
Class 



F-2itt 



Book ^S:^ 

Gopyiight N°_ . 

COPVRIGHT DEPOSrr 



THE 

History of Springfield 

in Massachusetts 

FOR THE YOUNG 

BEING ALSO IN SOME PART THE HISTORY OF 

OTHER TOWNS AND CITIES IN THE 

COUNTY OF HAMPDEN 

BY 

CHARLES H. BARROWS 




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PUMLISHED BY 

The Connecticut Valley Historical Society 
Springfield, Massachusetts 

1909 



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Copyright iQOg 

By 

Connecticut Valley Historical Society 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Comes Received 

APR 3 lyoa 

_ CopyrltfBt Entry ^ 
OlA^iS Ol. ''^^C, No, 

2,3 



5 SDC 



TO 

THE CHILDREN AND YOUTH 

OF SPRINGFIELD 

AND THE Neighboring Towns and Cities 

THIS BOOK 

written that they may know what is 
interesting good and true in the lives 
of those who have gone before them 
in this part of the connecticut valley 

IS 

DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I— Pages 1-20 

Geological History of Springfield and Its Neighborhood. The Lay 

OF THE Land and the Run of the Water. 

Poem: To the Connecticut River 

CHAPTER II.— Pages 21-40 

The Settlement. The Smithy. The Meeting-House. 

Poem: The Works of God. 

CHAPTER III.— Pages 41-58 
The Early Government. The Pynchon Family. Witchcraft. 

CHAPTER IV.— Pages 59-70 

King Philip's War and its Causes. Battles and Burnings in the 

Connecticut Valley. 

Poem: The Statue of the Puritan in Merrick Park. 

CHAPTER v.— Pages 71-86 

King Philip's War Concluded. The Burning of Springfield. 

Captain Holyoke and the Falls Fight. Close of the War. 

CHAPTER VI.— Pages 87-102 
Settlement of Chicopee and Other Towns. The Revolution. 

CHAPTER VII.— Pages 103-112 
Shays' Rebellion. The Constitution. 1783-1789. 

CHAPTER VIII.— Pages 113-130 

Old Times and New. The Change to Modern Ways. The First 

Steamboat. The Armory. Distinguished Visitors. 

Poem: The Arsenal at Springfield. 

CHAPTER IX.— Pages 131-144 
The New City. Anti-Slavery. The Civil War. 

CHAPTER X.— Pages 145-166 

A Look Backwards. The Spanish War. The Twentieth Century. 

Anniversary Hymn. 




The Founder of Springfield. 



CHAPTER I. 

GEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD AND ITS 
NEIGHBORHOOD— THE LAY OF THE LAND 
AND THE RUN OF THE WATER. 







The Site of SpRiNtiFiELD as thi; 



SPRINGFIELD is located on the bank of a fine river. It 
is true that the river is not deep enough for any but the 
smaller craft, but in the summer many pleasure boats 
skim over its surface. The city itself, as seen on the approach 
from the west or south, with the broad river in the foreground, 



NATURAL FEATURES 3 

and its buildings rising on gradually retreating terraces, all 
embowered in foliage, is, indeed, as was said of an ancient 
city, "beautiful for situation." 

Before the days of railroads, or even of good wagon roads, 
the river was of great consequence to Springfield in the way 
of commerce. It was by the river that the early settlers got 
their beaver skins and other goods to market, floating them 
down the stream and thence by sea to Boston. In the summer 
the river helps to cool the heated air. From the city to 
its source, near the Canadian border it is about three 
hundred and seventy miles and from the railroad bridge in 
Springfield to the lighthouse at the river's mouth seventy- 
one and a half miles more. The Agawam, which beyond 
Mittineague is called the Westfield, is one of its principal 
tributaries. While its name divides into three English words, 
this is a mere accident, yet it does cut in two New Hampshire 
and VeiTnont and the eastern and western portions of Massa- 
chusetts and Connecticut. The Indians named the stream 
and in their language Connecticut means "the long river." 

This is but one of many Indian names that belong to the 
locality of Springfield, some of which are in use today, like 
Pecowsic, Nayasset, Chicopee and Agawam. Mittineague was 
in Indian Menedgonuk, but has been worn by usage into the 
smoother form. The Indian place-names which are left to us 
in New England, like Wallamanumps, Massacksick, (Long- 
meadow) and Massachusetts are not so musical as those in the 
language of the western tribes, like Cayuga, Shiawassee and 
Minnehaha; but they all have a meaning which is worth 
finding out. 

Besides her share in "the great river," as the English 
settlers called it, Springfield has also a river almost all her own, 
a little one, indeed, but just big enough to be called by that 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



name. Its sources are at the foot of the Wilbraham moun- 
tains whence it flows by its north branch and south branch 
till these meet at the Watershops pond. After tumbling over 
two dams below the point of union the river loses itself in the 
Connecticut, near York street. It was so useful in the earliest 
times of the white settlers in grinding all the grain and sawing 
all the lumber that they thought "Mill River" a good and 

honorable name, 
and if those 
who come after 
us are sensible, 
by that name it 
" will always be 
, known. It still 
turns the great 
vvheel at the 
vVatershops and 
thus has a hand 
m making the 
1 ifles of the United 
States army. 

Next to Mill 
river, the stream 
that has been 
most important 
in the town's history, excei)t the Chicopee, or rivers that 
are no longer in the limits of Springfield, was the "Town 
brook." The Town brook, called in its upper part "Garden 
brook," rises to the east of St. James avenue bridge and 
flowing down the valley, formerly divided near the comer of 
Spring and Worthington streets, one branch going north and 
circling to the north of Round Hill on its way to the river, 




Mill River at the Watekwuops. 

From "Marco Paul at the Springfield Armory," by Jacob 

Abbott, 1853. 



NATURAL FEATURES 5 

while the other branch reached Main street, near Worthing- 
ton, and flowed along the easterly side of the street, which it 
crossed near York street and thence entered the river. But 
the waters of the once famous " Town brook" are now diverted 
into sewers, where they do a very useful, if very dirty work. 
The brook as it flowed by Main street was once a clear, good 
stream in which to fish. Such has been also the doom of other 
pretty rural brooks that once flowed among grassy banks 
from the slopes of the higher lands in now thickly settled parts 
of the city. Some of them, before the days of steam, were 
ponded by dams in order to create power for small factories. 

One of these ponds covered the region of Avon Place. 
There is a little brook which even today rises not far from the 
comer of State and Walnut streets and flows, for its whole 
course, unseen to the river, passing on its way just in front of 
the High School. It once formed the "Card Factory" pond 
and turned the wheels of a factory east of the Wesson Hospi- 
tal. But in dry times the little brook was not able to do all 
the work required of it; so it was helped by a huge mastiff, 
who was made to walk in a treadmill and thus by the brook 
and the mastiff together, was the machinery kept going, a 
singular example of manufacture by dog power. Springfield 
has even yet some share in the Chicopee river, which touches 
its northeastern border, and to it Indian Orchard owes its 
importance. 

There are a number of natural ponds, mostly fed by unseen 
springs. They either have an outlet under ground, or else the 
water flowing in is so nicely balanced by the water passing 
into the air by evaporation that they need no outlet. Where 
this balance is destroyed by the lessening of the supply of 
water, as by the cutting of trees, the pond diminishes in size 
and incidentally peat is formed. An example may be seen 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 




on the Wilbraham road beyond the North Branch. Goose 
pond, at first called Swan pond, because of the swans that 
stopped there on their spring and autumn journeys, was the 
very largest pond, and stretched northward from Winchester 
square. It was built over not many years ago. Two Mile 

pond seems likely 

.-". to meet the same 

^. ..-:."...• fate. Five Mile 

pond, named from 
its distance from 
Main street, is 
divided by the rail- 
road. Island pond, 
so called from its 
single island , a 
floating bog, is nearer, but little known. Loon pond is a pretty 
sheet of water and Venturer's pond is a pleasing feature of 
Sixteen Acres. The Sixteen Acres mill pond is perhaps a 
natural pond caused by a rock dam. In all there are ten 
natural ponds. The map accompanying this chapter shows 
the natural features and localities as they were in the days of 
the original settlers of Springfield. 

Before describing the lay of the land it is necessary to know 
something of its history; how in the story of the earth's 
making it came to be just what it is, its rocks and soil, its hills 
and valleys. To do this takes us back, perhaps, millions of 
years; for man's history is as nothing compared with that of 
the rocks. Deep down below the earth's surface lies the real 
floor on which all things above may be said to rest. It is 
composed of the strongest and oldest of the rocks, called crys- 
talline. It was by the action of earth's great fires, melting 
and fusing together the original raw materials of the world, 



NATURAL FEATURES 7 

that the crystalHne rocks were made. Look at a block of 
granite and you will find it made up of several things that 
could only have been got together by fire. 

Although crystalline rocks lie at the bottom, the}^ have 
sometimes got pushed up by the mighty forces of nature and 
so have made mountains. If you climb mountains even no 
higher than those surrounding Springfield, and find an exposed 
surface, you will come upon the hard rocks out of which they 
are built. In the valley they are not seen because of the over- 
lay of later rock and soil. Underneath Hampden county lies 
■a, bed of gneiss, a rock resembling granite. It is quarried in 
Monson and out of its blocks the Court House and Hall of 
Records have been constructed. 

After this solid old floor of gneiss was laid down, some 
very interesting things happened in this part of the Connecticut 
Valley, the story of which only the student of geology can 
fully appreciate; but something of it may be told here. There 
was, first, the rising of the mountains; the easterly range 
running between Wilbraham and Monson and the westerly, 
through Blandford and other towns. This rising made the 
present Connecticut Valley. Then the whole valley between 
these mountains, extending as far north as Greenfield, sank 
below the level of the ocean and of course the salt water 
flowed in. On the heights of the present Wilbraham, Bland- 
ford and other towns where the highlands penned the waters 
in, the tide rose and fell and the sea fishes, perhaps whales 
and sharks, could swim from East Longmeadow to Holyoke 
and beyond. In those times sand and mud were being carried 
down by the Connecticut river from the northern mountains 
in a way which will be described further on, and dropped in 
the bottom and on the shores of this inland sea. Reptiles and 
^eat birds walked on the shore. In the end this sand hardened 



8 HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 

and became a rock called sandstone, having sometimes im- 
printed in it the footsteps of these living beings. Sometimes 
too, raindrops left their marks in the sand and the raindrops 
and tracks have remained to tell a very old story in after ages. 
Specimens like that on this page may be seen in the Science 
Museum ; but the best collection is in the museum of Amherst 
College. It is this ancient sandstone, called by geologists, 
triassic, which is taken from the quarries of East Longmeadow. 



.^ ^ 



{ 



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/-^ 













FoOTI'RINT AND RaINPRINT.4 IN THK ThIASSK SANDSTONE 

OF THE Connecticut River. 

It was while the water extended from the Wilbraham 
mountains to the Blandford range that a great event happened 
a few miles from Springfield, caused by tlie action of sub- 
terranean fires. A great crack opened in the eartli and up 
rushed a mass of melted matter which finally cooled into the 
hardest kind of rock, a rock called trap. This rock formed 
Mount Tom and Mount Holyoke and all the range southerly 
which makes the line between West Springfield and Westfield. 
Again the earth opened and the molten volcanic matter thrown 
up at this time, a smaller mass than the other, formed a low 



NATURAL FEATURES 



and short range of hills extending through the western part of 
West Springfield and Agawam. The volcanic rock can be 
seen exposed to view in the trap rock quarries; also in the 
railroad cut between Tatham and Paucatuck in West Spring- 
field. Out of it is made the 
macadam for the streets. At 
the northern part of these 
breakings forth of earth's sub- 
terranean fires, there was a 
small volcano which probably 
continued fuming after the 
range of hills, whose making 
was connected with it, had 
been formed. The remains 
of the crater of this long ex- 
tinct volcano can still be seen, 
not far from Titan's pier at 
the foot of Mount Holyoke. 
It was after this that, in 
an era not so very far from 
our own, perhaps, another 
one of Nature's great forces, 
not directly fire or water, but 
connected with both in its 
origin, set itself in operation 

to make changes in the SUr- volcano Wokk: Map by William Orh. 

face of the earth in this neighborhood, and indeed, over a large 
part of North America. This was the Great Glacier, a sheet of ice 
that, starting in the Arctic regions, probably Labrador, ex- 
tended, in some places, half a mile thick all down the continent 
to a line drawn a good deal south of Springfield. Half a mile 
measures the distance from Court Square to the lower Armory 




10 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



gate on State street. The glacier was, as all glaciers are, 
really a great ice river; for it flowed slowly southward, bend- 
ing itself to go between the mountains in its course and bear- 
ing the fragments along with it. These fragments, when the 

glacier finally melt- 
ed, were dropped in 
places far away 
from their starting 
point and are now 
^^^^^ called boulders. In 
''yz^ some places they are 
lif^ thickly strewn, but 
"^are not so common 
\in the immediate 
valley, for reasons 
that we shall see. 
One of them, how- 
ever, now making 
a memorial stone on 
Benton Park, was found on the highlands near Brush Hill 
in West Springfield. 

The mountains, composed of the hard crystalline rocks, 
like the White mountains, and of trap, like Mount Tom, stood 
firm against the grinding power of the glacier, but many of 
the hardened deposits of sandstone were worn down. We 
cannot always tell just what damage was done to the sand- 
stone by the glacier and just what by the wearing of it away 
by the waters; but if you notice how high Mount Sugarloaf 
stands above the meadows of South Deerfield and Sunderland, 
and even how the sandstone hill at the south end of Main 
street is higher than the land around it, you will see how much 
bed-rock has been carried off to Connecticut which was once 




Boulders Dropped by a Glacier and Water-Worn 
Cobblestones. 



NATURAL FEATURES 11 

alongside. This bed-rock, broken up fine, as it would be by 
gradual water wear, makes the red earth so common in Suffield, 
Hartford and other Connecticut towns. It is some of Massa- 
chusetts that went down stream. At Locust street the sand- 
stone is close to the surface and the sewer is cut in the solid 
rock which extends southerly from a comer of the South 
Main street school. 

When the great glacier melted away it left a big pond 
bottom stretching from j\Iiddletown in Connecticut on the 
south to Holyoke on the north, easterly to the Wilbraham 
and west as far as the range of hills that separates West 
Springfield from Westfield. This big bottom became filled 
with water and is known to geologists as the Springfield 
lake. For a long time this lake remained. When you leave 
Court Square for Holyoke in the street cars your course is 
along the old lake bottom, the banks on either side being in 
plain view, until you reach the top of the bank itself at the 
Holyoke City Hall. The powerful current of the Connecticut, 
entering the lake at the gap between Mount Holyoke and 
Mount Tom, as also Chicopee river coming down from the 
northeast, made important changes in the lake bottom. What 
were they? 

Away to the north were the mountains of crystalline 
rocks, the White mountains and the Green mountains. Heat, 
cold and frost were slowly w^earing them away. Pebbles and 
sand came from them and fell into the little streams that ran 
among the hills. These pebbles and sand were carried down- 
ward by the streams into the great river. The river carried 
them into the great Springfield lake and gradually they were 
dropped on the bottom. If the current was powerful it carried 
the pebbles further; if it lacked, then not so far: the sand 
being lighter, would always go further than the pebbles. We 



12 HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 

have called the large pieces of rock, pebbles; but when they 
started on the southern journey they were rough edged. By 
tumbling over each other in their downward course they 
became rounded into pebbles. It was because this process, 
was kept up for ages that the crystalline rocks underneath 
Springfield are covered deep with something quite different. 
Where the pebbles fell in masses they made gravel beds, the 
like of which can be seen on the line of the railroad, not far 
from Oak Grove cemetery. 

But the history of the sand dropping is the more interest- 
ing. Remember that, when the flow of water was swift and 
strong, the lighter grains went on and only the heavier ones, 
were dropped. When the current slackened, the heavier 
grains stopped further up stream and the lighter ones in the- 
spot where the larger ones were at first. So we expect to find 
layers of sand of varying thicknesses, one or the other, according 
as the current was swift or slow. 

Sometimes the sand varies in color, as underneath Maple- 
avenue in the Peabody cemetery. The children who dis- 
covered this by digging holes to China called one layer of it. 
"fireman's sand," for its red color. In fact Armory Hill, 
extending for miles east, is covered with sand of varying sized 
grains. On the brow of the hill at Union street the grains, 
exposed in building are coarse and good for mortar; a little 
distance east, on Walnut street, they are finer and not so good 
for this purpose. After you have noticed these different kinds, 
of sand, look at one of the great stone posts at the gates of the 
Armory and you will find that it is composed of just such 
sand, only the mass of grains is compacted into stone, the 
color of which is a brown red. This post was taken out of the- 
quarries of Longmeadow, where the sand droppings of a time 
long before the period of the great glacier had been pressed 



NATURAL FEATURES 



13 




into stone by the great weight above them, making a stone 
or rock called sandstone. Some sandstone is red and some is 
brown, and it is called sedimentary, because made out of the 
sediment, or settlings, of water. 

Sometimes the mixture of sand and mud (the mud was 
only a wet mass of grains so fine as to be almost unnoticeable) 
did not harden enough to make sandstone but only got 
pressed into a shelly state that was almost and yet not quite 
stone. This substance is called shale and mav be seen in a 
bank at the foot of Walnut ___.^^^ 

street. When the masses ^x^-<Z^~^ — ""'•.^-^<^'' 

of grains are so fine as to 
be nothing more, when in 
the water, than mud mixed 
with a certain sticky 
substance, the deposit, or a piece of shale. 

droppings, is called clay, such as can be seen at any brickyard. 
Clay banks mean, of course, that the water out of which the 
fine particles were laid down, was moving very slowly, perhaps 
scarcely at all. Remembering, then, that deep, down are the 
crystalline or fire-created rocks, we can read in the sandstone, 
the shale, the gravel and the sand that lies above them the 
various movings of the 
waters in this part of the /, i 

sea, or, later, the Spring- 
field lake. Nay, more; 
for at the Science Mu- 
seum may be seen a 
specimen of stone all 
rippled over with the 
wave marks of the 
water that flowed back s,.Kvn,.,K,. jjo.k. 




14 HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 

and forth over the muddy shore. Such deposits of sand, mud, 
clay, etc., as have been described, give to the earth, when a 
section of it is laid open, a kind of layer-cake effect, called 
stratification. 

There is another thing about the geological history of 
Springfield that ought to be noted. The lay of the land is 
very far from level ; what is the cause of it ? The reason is in 
the fact that the great body of water which once flowed through 
the valley, being some of the time more of a lake than a river, 
had, at difterent periods, dift'erent levels and made for itself 
more than one set of banks. 

If you will go down to the river, at the foot of State street, 
you will find the bank somewhat high and rather steep. The 
stream is well shut in and may rise and fall in spring and 
summer without much effect except in the lower sewers. 
Look across and you will see that the western bank is not so 
high; in a freshet the water will be covering the Agawam 
meadows. If it were not for the artificial bank or dyke, 
Merrick would then be overflowed. Nevertheless, by con- 
tinual deposits of mud the river is building for itself a higher 
western bank. How long this process of filling the river 
bottom and building the river banks has gone on is unknown ; 
but certain it is that twenty feet down in the side of a well, 
near the western end of the Chicopee bridge in West Spring- 
field there lies on its side a great tree two feet in diameter. 

It is tlie action of water, building up land in some places 
and wearing it away in others, that makes Springfield, in its 
most populous part, so uneven, yet picturesque. Imagine 
yourself standing at the foot of State street: turn about and 
go up the street to Dwight and you will then begin to ascend 
an incline, until, when you reach the statue of the Puritan, 
or better, stand in front of Christ church, you are on another 



NATURAL FEATURES 



15 



bank of the river, as it once was. Pursue your walk up State 
street, and entering the Armory gate, go to the brow of the 
hill and you can see, in imagination, a still larger river or 
rather, lake, stretching at your feet. Then you have passed 
over two levels and are on the third. It would be well if these 
levels were called terraces, as they are in geology. The lower 
one extends through the whole length of the city; the next 
appears near Brightwood and with Chestnut and Maple streets 




A Bank of the Ancient Lake. 

at its western border, loses itself under Crescent Hill; the 
highest is continuous throughout the city and extends to the 
eastern limits. We may call the three the lower, the middle 
and the upper terrace. They are indicated on the map on a 
preceding page. 

The lay of the land in Springfield is not only affected by 
the motion of the great body of water from north to south, 
but in a lesser degree by smaller currents flowing westward. 
If one should start at Cornell street for a walk, along the very 



16 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



brow of the hill, keeping as close to it as he could, except for 
the houses and private grounds that would prevent it being 
exactly close, and end his walk at Long Hill, he would find it 
a long walk indeed, much longer because of the windings and 
turnings of the different small valleys and ravines that cut 
into the general line of the bank. These are the work of 
water, either surface water or water bursting from springs in 
the higher lands and cutting channels in the earth by carrying 
the earth itself away. In Springfield this process is pretty 
much stopped now, but it can still be seen going with striking 
effect, at a place on the old Smith farm (now Fitch farm) in 
Tatham in West Springfield, a place that has for years been 
known as the "Cave Hole." The great ravines in Forest Park 
were produced in this way. 

Just how all the separate hills and hillocks of Springfield 
were made would be an interesting study and a few of them 
may be mentioned. Round Hill, for example, provokes a 
natural inquiry as to how it was made. There it is, all of sand, 
standing right up between its three enclosing streets. How 




9 ^^gmMimmlc 



?f- 



Flagg's Hillock and Summkrhouse. 



NATURAL FEATURES 17 

did it come there ? One explanation is that while the sand lay 
that much deep in the valley, strong currents flowing in the 
old lake washed out the sand all around and for some reason 
left this mass of sand standing alone. It would be interesting 
to guess, likewise, on the geological history of Flagg's hillock, 
.at the bend of the Bay road beyond Oak Grove cemetery. 
This is the highest hill entirely within the limits of the city, 
being 260 feet above sea level; but the slope of Necessity Hill, 
at the point where the Hampden road crosses the boundary 
line into East Longmeadow is about sixt}^ feet higher. 

Such then were the forces, — fire, water, ice, gravitation, and 
lieat and cold,— that make the lay of the land and the run of 
the water what it is in Springfield today. They were power- 
ful forces that did a deal of rough building work, sometimes 
in a very rough way. But when plant life began and the sand 
and clay were covered with a life-giving soil, all over the plain 
■of the upper terrace came the evergreen pine, and down on 
the middle terrace were chestnuts and maples and on the lower 
terrace, there took root those grand elms, which have not yet 
■ceased to be the pride of the Valley. In the Science Museum 
may be seen a section of one that stood on Elm street, near 
the Hall of Records, and rose to the height of one hundred and 
fifteen feet. Thus a scene of geological interest became at 
last a scene of sylvan beauty. 

Fully to appreciate these changes, climb the stairs of the 
Arsenal at the Armory, on a summer day, and come out on 
the open platform. To the east and west are the mountains 
that once confined the sea; to the north are Mount Tom and 
Mount Holyoke that remain to tell the story of volcanic 
■outburst. Beneath is the river, the mere relic of its ancient 
self, but still majestic. All about is a mass of green leafage, 
in which more than in almost any other city, Springfield is 



18 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



embowered. The crash of mountains, lifting their heads for 
the first time to the sky, the flash and smoking of volcanic 
fires, the rush of molten lava to the surface, the awful approach 
of the great glacier, carrying destiniction on every hand, the 
strange huge reptiles that trod the shores of the inland sea, — 
are forever gone. To the chaos and disorder of the old earth's 
making has succeeded peace. The time is ripe for man ; for 
human happiness and love. It was into this scene of quiet 
beauty that the forefathers came to establish their homes. 




NATURAT. FEATURES 19 



TO THE CONNECTICUT RIVER. 

From that lone lake, the sweetest of the chain 

That links the mountain to the mighty main, 

Fresh from the rock and swelling by the tree, 

Rushing to meet and dare and breast the sea — 

Fair, noble, glorious river! in the wave 

The sunniest slopes and sweetest pastures lave ; 

The mountain torrent, with its wintry roar 

Springs from its home and leaps upon thy shore: — 

The promontories love thee — and for this 

Turn their rough cheeks and stay thee for thy kiss. 

The young oak greets thee at the water's edge, 
Wet by the wave, though anchored in the ledge. 
— 'Tis there the otter dives, the beaver feeds. 
Where pensive oziers dip their willowy weeds. 
And there the wild cat purrs amid her brood, 
And trains them in the sylvan solitude, 
To watch the squirrel's leap, or mark the mink 
Paddling the water by the quiet brink ; — ■ 
Or to out-gaze the gray owl in the dark, 
Or hear the young fox practising to bark. 

Thou dost not stay, when Winter's coldest breath 

Howls through the woods and sweeps along the heath — 

One mighty sigh relieves thy icy breast. 

And wakes thee from the calmness of thy rest. 

Down sweeps the torrent ice — it may not stay 

By rock or bridge, in narrow or in bay — 

Swift, swifter to the heaving sea it goes. 

And leaves thee dimpling in thy sweet repose. 

Yet as the unharmed swallow skims his way. 

And lightly drops his pinion in thy spray. 

So the swift sail shall seek thy inland seas. 

And swell and whiten in thy purer breeze. 

New paddles dip thy waters, and strange oars 

Feather thy weaves and touch thy noble shores. 

—Brainard, 1797-1828. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE SETTLEMENT.— THE SMITHY— THE MEETING-HOUSE. 




T WAS in mid-May of the 
year 1636 that the settlers 
of Springfield left Roxbury 
to find themselves a home in 
the valley of the Connecticut. 
There were not many, perhaps 
twenty, perhaps forty, who 
came at first. How man}^ chil- 
dren there were we do not 
know; but there were at least 
two. Their names were John and Mary Pynchon. John and 
Mary were both under twelve years old, but old enough to 
walk some part of the way and some of the time they probably 
rode on one of their father's horses. In fact, their father, 
William Pynchon, was the leader of the expedition and the 
founder of the new plantation. There could have been no 
better man for the purpose. He was alike good and true, 
brave and kind, and understood how to deal with white men 
and Indians. John and Mary grew up to be like him in many 
respects. 

The travelers were, of course, some days, perhaps a week, 
on the journey; for they had only the forest path to follow, 
good enough for Indians, but not so good for people incum- 
bered with luggage and traveling with horses or cattle. At 
night they made a camp around a blazing fire and some one 



22 HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 

probably stayed awake to keep a lookout for Indians, while 
the others slept. When the morning broke, they read the 
Bible together and sang psalms before again starting on their 
way. As John and Mary Pynchon were born in England 
they were doubtless interested in the flowers that marked the 
springtime in the new world and amused themselves every 
day, gathering columbine, lady's slipper, wake-robin and the 
novel kinds of violets. Now and then they would see Jack- 
in-the-pulpit sticking up his head under a green canopy, and 
curious pitcher plant meadow-cup, not yet in bloom. In the 
dry woods they would pick partridge berries. As for dande- 
lions and buttercups, that now make such a bright show in the 
spring, Mary and John were to reach this region quite ahead 
of them ; for these are English plants that in after years were 
to spread over the country from seeds brought by the colonists. 

At last the settlers arrived on the banks of the wide-rolling 
Connecticut. The shade of the forest was behind them and 
here were pleasant open spaces and rippling waters and the 
bright sun shining over all. To the north was a mountain, 
outlined against the sky somewhat like a couched lion, but 
later to be known by the simple name of Mount Tom. In this 
new home they w^ere, perhaps, sometimes lonely, thinking 
of the homes over in England, but they were not exactly 
alone. Older inhabitants of the land were about them, the 
friendly Indians who lived on the banks of the Agawam and 
on the heights of Long Hill and who were glad that the settlers 
had come, and sold them land on which to build and to plant. 

To John and Mary Pynchon the Indian children must have 
been both queer and interesting as they rolled down the banks 
in play or shot toy arrows at imaginary game. On the plains 
east of the river, and in fact, all about, their fathers and 
grandfathers, time out of memory, had chased the deer and 



THE SETTLEMENT 23 

the rabbit and for many years to come the arrow heads that 
they lost in the chase will be turned out of the soil by those 
who never saw an Indian. A Springfield boy found one of 
these in the garden, years after another in a hen yard, and 
a third at the foot of a telegraph pole where workmen had been 
upturning the soil. The Indians could neither read nor write ; 
they have gone, leaving their histoiy untold as men write 
histor\^; but the stone implements they made and the names 
they gave to rivers, ponds and hills, remain to tell how they 
lived and what they thought. 

The Indians planted some com and pease; they taught 
the newcomers how to make the savory succotash, and the 
dish and the name, just as they gave it, are likely to last. 
But they lived mainly by hunting and fishing and did not use 
much planting ground. So they were willing to sell to William 
Pynchon and his companions a long stretch of excellent land 
on both sides of the river. Their own planting grounds were 
at the mouth of the Agawam river, near which they cured 
their fish for winter use and they sold to the settlers Massack- 
sick, (Longmeadow), Usquaiok, which is the land in the 
neighborhood of Mill river, and Nayasset, the meadow land 
stretching north from Round Hill. All these lands were good 
for planting and pasture. That extending up the hills back 
from the river on both sides had no value to the Indians but 
for hunting, and they seem to have been willing that the 
whites should use it in common with them for that or any other 
purpose, like the cutting of firewood. The land was made 
over to the settlers by a written deed, the meaning of which 
was carefully explained to the Indians, and their chief men 
signed it by making, each, a picture at the bottom. Their 
pictures included an arrow, a canoe, a bow and a feather, 
things of everyday Indian use. The price paid was ten 



24 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



fathom of wampum, ten coats, ten hoes, ten hatchets and' 
ten knives. 

Why did the settlers choose this place right here in the 
valley, close by a tribe of savages, instead of establishing 
themselves on the highlands or remote from the river? First, 
because the land, all Massacksick, Usquaiok and Nayasset,. 
was excellent land for cultivation; and, again, because being 
near the river was like being today on the line of a railroad. 
The Indians were continually going up and down the stream 
in their canoes and, by the river, beaver and other skins could 
be sent away to market and other goods brought from Boston' 
or England. Mr. Pynchon w^as a shrewd trader and made much 
money by buying skins of the Indians to send away. The 
beaver, almost humanly wise in building its curious dams, 
has been, of course, long since gone, and is not now found 
nearer than northern Maine ; but in those days, the region 
about and above Westfield was the heart of the beaver 
country, for the valley trade. The otter, (page 18) a fish- 
eating animal, was once common, but is now very rare here- 
abouts. 




.-V Settlement with Wellsweep and Virginia Rail Fence. 



THE SETTLEMENT 25 

Just where the houses of the settlers should be on this 
great tract of land which they bought was, of course, an 
important question. At first they expected to settle on the 
Agawam meadows, and, in fact, had put up one house there; 
but the Indians told them that the meadows were flooded in 
high water; so they decided in favor of the east side of the 
"Great River," as they began to call the Connecticut, and 
they did, in fact, call it by no other name for a hundred years. 
From Round Hill and above, down to Mill river lay a good 
stretch of plough land, good for com and wheat, and right 
across the stream was ample pasture. This meadow land 
was bounded on the east by a long narrow marsh, so full of 
hummocks that they began to call it "hassocky marsh." 
It occupied land between the present Main street and the line 
of Chestnut and Maple streets. Its west boundary was the 
brook mentioned in the previous chapter. It must have been 
somewhat troublesome and of course was filled long since; 
but by jumping from one hummock to another, the high and 
dry land could be reached, where there was a heavy growth 
of trees, some of them probably maple and chestnut ; so that 
Maple and Chestnut streets are properly named. 

From these trees could be cut Avood for the fire or timbers 
for canoes; but good, large canoe timber was so scarce that 
after a man, with much labor had got a canoe made, he was 
not allowed to sell it out of the town without consent of the 
inhabitants. It having been decided where the street should 
be, the houses all on the west side, each settler's land extended 
in a rectangular form eastward from his house across the 
marsh to the upper terrace and westward across the river for 
some distance into the meadows there. A century and a 
half were to pass before there would be a bridge over the 
stream. Connecting the street with the river was a narrow 



26 



IllSrOUV OF SPKINCiFIELD 



lane in the line of the present Elm street and another which 
is the present Cypress street. At the foot of the first lane, 
close to the river, were the training field, the burying ground 
and the pound. Another lane was opened to the "lower 
landing" at York street. 

Nothing has been told us about the early house building, 
but many settlements resembling that in the picture have 

been made in New 
England and other 
parts of the country. 
It was warm weather 
and at first there were 
]:)robably rude camps, 
made of the boughs 
of trees. The first 
liouse was presumably 
of logs, the cracks 
filled with clay or mor- 

Thatching the Shed. tar tO kcCp OUt tllC 

cold. For a roof there would be a thatch of straw or 
grass. When the long snowy winter began, so unlike 
the short open winters in England, where flowers sometimes 
bloom in I^\'bruary, they perhaps felt very comfortably 
settled. It may be that some f)f the first houses were not of 
logs. The falls in Mill river were set to work as soon as the 
machinery of a saw mill could be got from Boston; and the 
result was boards and shingles and (.-lapboards, for those who 
could afford them. When the first crop of grain had been 
raised and threshed out with the flail, the same little stream 
was set to the grinding. No wonder that they called it Mill 
river, regardless of the Indian name. Its mills were all in all 




'1 HE SETTT.EMFAT 



27 



to them, for now, tlianks to it, they had good housing and 
wholesome Hving. 

In some respects, indeed, they hved better tlian in tlie old 
country. They had to get used to much colder winters; and 
many conveniences which they had enjoyed before, they could 
not have here. But the land easily gave them enough to eat 
in greater plenty than England could have done ; partly 
because of their cultivated fields, partly because of the wild 
^ame, such as quail, partridge, ducks and pigeons. In fall 
and spring the pigeons passed over sometimes in such num- 
bers as almost to darken the sky. These they caught in nets. 
Game birds were shot witli a fowling piece for scattering the 
shot among a number of birds at once, like that on the shoulder 
of Miles Morgan in the Court Square statue. If woodchucks 
■or moles became troublesome to the crops, there w^as a simple 
way of catching them bv bending down a slender staddle 




fitted with a slipnoose and slightly fastening the end by a peg. 
When the offender nibbled the bait and was caught, he was 
jerked into the air and hung suspended. 

Established at last in the wilderness, all alone except for 
a few Indians, how was it that the forefathers, grown-ups and 
■children, employed themselves? What did they do for work 



28 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



and play? There was plenty of work: cutting down trees for 
firewood; hollowing great logs for canoes; planting com in 
spring, hoeing it in summer and husking and threshing it in 
the autumn; boxing pine trees on the plains and making the 
oozing pitch into tar and rosin; cutting grass for hay and 
getting it into stacks for winter use. In these things the 
young folks, and even children, must have had an important 
share. The many mechanical helps to labor in these days were 
lacking and it was a time when "many hands make light 
work," even little hands. 

In that day and, indeed, well along into the nineteenth 
century, boys and girls had to invent and make many more 
of their playthings than they do now, when so much is done by 
machinery. Girls could make rude dolls and boys make traps 
and snares and little water wheels and pin boxes out of the 

stems of elderwood. Here is an English 
boy of five hundred years ago who 
probably made the windmill he is 
whirling, just such a one as boys make 
now; and below is "Mary Bump," 
an aged Springfield doll. Her body 
is a corn-cob. There was not much 
art but there was invention and imagi- 
nation, and it is from these, in the end,, 
that art comes. 

Some of the comforts of the old 
country were wanting, but they were 
more than made up in the spirit of 
freedom and independence in a land 
where some great lord could not turn 
the people off the soil if he chose, and 
where they could worship God in the way they pleased. 





THE SETTLEMENT 



29 



It was not so in England. Only Mr. Pynchon had been 
a landholder there and not many years after the settle- 
ment of Springfield the fierce struggle going on in Eng- 
land for political and religious liberty ended in a civil 
war, which cost King Charles his crown and life. The 
fact that the settlers here had land for the using of 
it made them all farmers, whatever calling they had followed 
in the old country. To cultivate the soil w^as the most natural 




Old-Time English Children Playing Horse. 

and easy thing to do. At first there was no minister (we 
are speaking of all the early times) who was not also something 
of a farmer, as many ministers were even down to Dr. Osgood 
in the nineteenth century. 

But there is one trade which is very necessary even to a 
small community of farmers; there are horses and oxen to 
be shod, plows mended and all sorts of farming and domestic 
implements to be repaired, and in a place so far away from 
the rest of the world as Springfield, these would sometimes 
need to be made on the spot. For all this there was need of 
a blacksmith. After ten years had passed no one had come 
to the settlement who could do this work or do it well. There 



30 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



are many kinds of smiths, like whitesmiths and locksmiths, 
and how many people gave especial attention to smithery is 
plain when one stops to consider how common is the name 
of Smith. But the blacksmith is, in a young settlement like 
Springfield, the most important of all. The townspeople felt 
that they must have a blacksmith, and just as one puts up a 
bird box expecting the birds to come and nest in it, they 
actually paid Francis Ball in w^heat for building a blacksmith 
shop when there was no smith in sight. It had a chimney 
and forge, and one door and a window. There were rings in 
the chimnev. 




.^a tbc sparhs; bouj thn? rtp ! 

let the aniiil lino ! 
l^?ammcrctl barD, ujclDcb tight, 

3 ton to ivon shall ciino. 




The Iniilding done, Mr. Pynchon, through his agent in 
London, Ixmght a l)lacksmitl-i ; a strange thing to do, but this 
is the way it came about. There was war between England 
and Scotland and in the battle of Dunbar the Scotch were 
defeated and many of tliem ])rought as prisoners to England. 
Not knowing what to do with thcin, the English, following 
the custom of those days, sold them into slavery, but not a 
slavery for life. In the end they were to be free. Such was 
the lot of h^lm Stewart, who was sent to Mr. Pynchon in this 
plantation and at once established in the new smithy. This 



THE SETTLEMENT 31 

was a great blessing to the village and, one can well imagine, 
a source of never ending interest to its children. There is a 
charming mystery in the union of two pieces of red hot metal, 
whose explanation, if there be one other than the power and 
mystery of God himself, lies far back in the secret laws and 
workings of nature. 

All that Longfellow has written of the Village Blacksmith, 

" A mighty man is he 
With large and sinewy hands," 

was doubtless true of John Stewart, as all the children be- 
lieved, when they looked in at the open door. When the 
blacksmith had paid by his work for his passage over the sea 
and the other expenses ]\Ir. Pynchon had incurred for him, 
he was given his freedom by Pynchon and the town presented 
him with the smithy. 

About the time that the smith}^ was built it was decided 
ta build a meeting-house. Before this, when the townsmen 
met to make rules for the plantation, or all the people met for 
worship, they had gathered in a private house, or in summer, 
perhaps, under some wdde-spreading ', , 

tree. Everything was as yet very simple 
as compared with the old country, 
where they had churches of stone, 
some of them quite beautiful with 
tower and colored windows, and curious 
carvings without and within. Notice 
the contrast between the churches repre- 
sented on these pages. In the sim- g.^rgoyle or eavespout, 
plicity of the new world one building ^''"'^'^'' Stratford, Exg. 
must serve for all public gatherings, be it public worship 
or town meeting. So they spoke not of the church, 




82 HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 

but called the building the " meeting-house." In the language 
of the law, in Massachusetts, this is the word still used. Town 
and church were pretty much the same in the early days of 
New England and the whole village supported the one and 
only minister. 

It was planned that the meeting-house should be forty 
feet long and twenty-five feet wide; that it should have two 
floors or stories, the lower one to be nine feet high. For a 
time the upper one was used for storing grain, until, at last, 
the people began to be afraid that the heavy weight would 
come down upon them and they took away the floor and 
built galleries round about the sides. But this was not for 
several years. The building having been planned, it was de- 
cided that it should be placed on the spot which is now the 
southeast comer of Court Square. Thomas Cooper was em- 
ployed as the contractor who should construct it. He agreed 
to take his pay in wheat, pease, pork, wampum, debts and 
labor. It is easy to see from this what, in those days, was 
most common in passing from hand to hand. Not a penny 
of English money was to be paid for building the meeting- 
house; it was too scarce. Wampum was the money of the 
Indians and made of shells. Upon the meeting-house there 
were built two turrets or little towers. One was for the bell; 
in the other a watchman could stay during service or at other 
times, should the Indians be hostile, and watch lest some 
Indian thief steal into the village or even a whole war party 
make a sudden dash into the street. 

In order that we may see all the townspeople gathered 
together, in these early days, let us make in imagination our 
attendance at the meeting-house at the hour of public worship 
on some Sunday, The sacred day had begun at sundown of 
Saturday and will end when the Sunday's sun has set behind 



THE SETTLEMENT 



33 



the Berkshire hihs. It is, we will say, the year 1663. Passing 
along the main street and turning down the lane that has 
since been widened and called Elm street, we enter, as all 
the people do, by the side door on the south. There seems to 
have been no door opposite the pulpit. We find ourselves 
directly under one of the galleries. Some of the people are 




CHt'RrH OF ( ) 



already seated and others are coming in. They know it is the 
time of service, not because they have any clocks or watches 
(most of them), but because John Mathews has been beating 
the drum up and down the street and because the bell in the 
turret is now ringing. 

The people are seating themselves just where it has been 
voted that they shall sit. Anyone who should sit elsewhere 
would be liable to a fine of three shillings and four pence. 



34 HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 

We are taken up the alley, as they called it, on the south side 
and are shown into a seat not far from the pulpit. Just 
before us, in the front seat, are some of the selectmen, among 
them Thomas Cooper, the builder of the house. Back of us 
is Thomas Day, who had married his daughter, Sarah, but 
neither Sarah Day nor her mother is sitting with the husband. 
In those days it was not thought proper that the women should 
sit with the men, and the women all found seats together. 
Up in the gallery we notice Miles Morgan in the place where 
the selectmen have appointed him to be in order to check 
any disorder among the boys or young men. Most of them 
are sitting there. Next the pulpit, in the deacon's seat, dis- 
tinguished in some way from the other seats, is Deacon Chapin. 
Just how he looked or how Miles Morgan looked, if one gazed 
directly into their faces, nobody knows; but the statues in 
their honor show us what kind of men they were, what sort 
of garments they wore and how they appeared as they went 
about the town. The sculptor has represented Deacon Chapin 
on his way to "meeting" and ^liles Morgan going afield with 
his hoe and fowling piece. 

Most of the people whom we see in the audience are of 
English birth or descent, but Reice Bedortha probably came 
from AVales and John Riley was from Ireland. Peter Swink, 
who sits under the gallery, is a black man in the family of 
Mr. Pynchon and in the seventh seat is John Stewart, the 
Scotchman. Longfellow writes of tlie vihage l^lacksmith that 

" He goes on Sunday to tlie cliurcli 
And sits among his boys," 

but our blacksmith seems not to have been blessed with any 
family except his wife. We may suppose, though, that when 



THE SETTLEMENT 35 

at his smithy he made friends with the children who 

" coming from school, 
Looked in at the open door," 

if, indeed, there was a school in those days. 

We notice an especial seat, which we are afterwards told 
was made for a guard of soldiers, and therefore called "the 
guard's seat." No guard now occupies it, for the Indian 
war, that raged in the Connecticut colony about the time w^hen 
the town was settled, is long since over and the Springfield 
Indians have always been peaceable; so the guard's seat is 
occupied by boys, who like to get together in it or to sit on 
the pulpit stairs. Anthony Dorchester sits with them to keep 
order, for even old time boys were mischievous. Sometimes 
.on week days they broke the meeting-house window^s in their 
games, and this meant a fine of twelve pence apiece. 

' In some of the New England churches wealth and rank 
determined where people should be seated. This was at times 
and perhaps always, to a certain extent, regarded in Spring- 
field ; but not so much as in some other places. Age was also 
regarded. As much as the forefathers loved freedom and as 
much as they, in their sturdy principles, have done to promote 
equal rights for all, they were not yet free from many old 
world notions about rank and the importance of property in 
giving a standing in society. Outside the church these things 
are very liable to be wTongly estimated, but inside it might 
be supposed that those who studied the Bible would remember 
what is there said: "The rich and the poor meet together; 
the Lord is the maker of them all." Yet even as late as the 
early part of the last century, in the old white church of West 
Springfield, an all-compelling custom did not admit of a young 



36 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



woman taking a front seat in the gallery where the unmarried 
women sat, unless she wore a silk gown, and of course some 
could never afford it. Thus sometimes do men forget that 
God is no respecter of persons and only a pure heart counts 
in his sight. 




First Meeting-House in West Springfield. 

Soon the minister enters. He wears a black gown and white 
neck band. As he approaches the pulpit stairs, the boys who 
are sitting there give way and he mounts to his high seat. 
He prays and reads from the big Bible and then begins his 
sermon. There is no clock ; but by him stands the hour glass, 
and, if the sermon is very long, he has to turn the glass and 



THE SETTLEMENT 



37 




start the sand running again. Sermons were long in those 

days. Paper, too, was scarce and costly, and for this reason 

they were written so fine that they had to be read slowly. 

When the minister has finished the people pass reverently 

out, pursuing their several ways up and down the village 

road, which is indeed the Main street, but almost the only 

one. Some of the 
boys have stopped on 
the edge of the has- 
socky marsh and are 
looking into the brook. 
They are planning to 
fei drop a fish line in 
there tomorrow. Per- 
haps, if they cross the 

marsh, they will flush a crane. 

A smithy had been built and a meeting-house, but as yet, 

after the lapse of forty years, there had been no schoolhouse. 

We read in the town records of no teacher paid by the town. 

Perhaps there were, irregularly, dame schools, taught by some 

woman, who like Goody Two 

Shoes, received her pay di- 
rectly from the parents. The 

most that the children learned 

was probably reading and 

writing, and it was not com.- 

mon for girls to write. Even 

some of the men, as Miles 

Morgan, could not write. In 

1675 there arrived in the 




A Dame Schdol. 

In other days 
Our fathers learned the horn-book and the rule, 
They toed the line or topped the dunce's stool; 
An ancient dame presided as they read, 
. "P\ ■ 1 T^ J. And if they erred, her thimble rapped each head ; 

town one JJaniel JJentOn, Each Uttle girl a sampler made, in time, 

And wrought thereon her simple faith, in rhyme. 
Esther W. Bates. 



who was qualified to teach. 



dlaiL^i^adl. 



38 HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 

He was at once employed for this purpose. He wrote 
a fair hand and was chosen to write the records of 
the town business. For a time he taught in a private 
house. Then a schoolhouse was built. It may seem strange 
that it was placed on the upper Ferry lane, now Cypress street ; 
but the land was w^ell taken up at the center of the village 

and then, again, the children would 
'// ^® coming from not only as far 

south as Long Hill or Longmeadow, 

AUTOGKAPH OF THE FiRST , , f. , , f^, ■ 

Schoolmaster. but aS tar nortll aS ChlCOpCe. 

After a while a rule was made that for every child in attend- 
ance the parent must furnish a load of wood for the school- 
house fires. It w^as a simple school, not of much value for 
older boys and girls, perhaps. There was reading, writing 
and spelling, and perhaps some arithmetic ; and if Daniel 
Denton came from England, as perhaps he did, he had some- 
thing to tell the children of the Old World which they would 
never see and of which there were no newspapers and very 
few books to tell them. There were no Sunday schools in 
those days and perhaps the best teaching in the school was 
concerning the great things of God such as those set forth in 
the following verses, which were taught to some of the Spring- 
field children in the nineteenth century by Dr. Peabody, of 
whom we shall read later on. 




Tin: SF/rXLEMEXT 39 



THE WORKS OF GOD. 

To be Spoken by Children. 

The God in whom I ever trust 
Hath made my body from the dust ; 
He gave me hfe, he gave me breath, 
And he preserves me still from death. 

He made the sun, and gave him light; 
He made the moon to shine by night; 
He placed the brilliant stars on high, 
And leads them through the midnight sky. 

He made the earth in order stand; 
He made the ocean and the land; 
He made the hills their places know, 
And gentle rivers round them flow. 

He made the forest, and sustains 
The grass that clothes the fields and plains; 
He sends from heaven the summer showers, 
And makes the meadows bright with flowers. 

He made the living things; with care 
He feeds the wanderers of the air ; 
He gave the beasts their dens and caves: 
And fish their chvelling in the wa\^es. 

He called all beings into birth 
That crowd the ocean, air, and earth ; 
And all in heaven and earth proclaim 
The glory of liis holy name. 

—Peabodw 1799- 1847 




CHAPTER III. 



THE EARI>Y GOVERNMENT —THE PYNCHON 
FAMILY— WITCHCRAFT. 

WE HAVE already seen that the meeting-house was the 
town house as well as the church; here the men of 
the plantation met to arrange all its business. One 
who did not come or who was late had a fine to pay. Even 
Deacon Chapin was fined for an absence, such was the import- 
ance which the forefathers placed upon a careful attention 
to public affairs. In our own day the President of the United 
States has often set the example for others by leaving his 



42 HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 

pressing duties at Washington and travelling many hundred 
miles, in order to cast his vote, a vote that counted among 
the thousands no more than any other. 

After eight years the plantation decided to place its affairs 
in the hands of a committee, a committee which should be 
chosen once a year; so they selected Henry Smith, Thomas 
Cooper, Samuel Chapin, Richard Sikes and Henry Burt, to serve 
for the first year. They were called "select townsmen" or 
"selectmen" and were given power "to order anything that 
they shall judge best for the good of the town." After that 
the voters generally met only once or twice a year. Some of 
the declared duties of the selectmen were to lay out public 
highways, make bridges, repair highways, see to the scouring 
of ditches, to the killing of w^olves, and to the training of 
children in some good calling. Some of these duties, like the 
laying out of streets, still belong to the city council and some 
have become obsolete. 

It seems odd to read about the scouring of ditches, for 
ditches are more used in the old countries, especially in 
Holland, for the dividing of lots, than here ; but it was necessary 
to keep the town brook clean, for in it the villagers washed 
their fresh-killed beef and pork, and from it, to some extent, 
they probably got water for domestic purposes. For two 
centuries the town brook was a very useful institution and 
deserves to be remembered. 

The selectmen were especially charged with the killing of 
wolves, for these were a great trouble, howling and hungry 
when their food w^as scarce and picking up cattle and stray 
pigs that happened to be in the outlands. The town owned 
a wolf trap. Its stout jaws, hidden by a screen of leaves, 
when stepped on by the unwary animal, would come together 
with a powerful snap and hold him by the leg. He could be 



THE SETTLEMENT 



43 



baited by a bleating lamb as in the picture. Another scheme 
was to so adjust a gun that it would go off when the wolf 
stepped on a certain spot, to get the bait of meat; but occa- 
sionally an innocent cow got killed instead of the wolf. A 
large reward, ec^ual in money of today to about ten dollars, 
was paid by the town for every wolf killed and the slayer had 
to bring the ears, or the head or the tail of the beast to the 
selectmen for proof. 

In those days children were more disturbed \\-ith stories 
about wolves than bears, but when in later years, the wolves 
had been killed off, bears began to be troublesome, for they 
liked pig pork, butchered by themselves, too well; so a 
reward was offered for bears and also for catamounts or 
panthers. It was not only the wild animals that the select- 
men had to look after. Everybody 
kept pigs and the porkers were always 
watching for a chance to roam about 
and root up pastures and break 
through fences with their strong 
snouts. In the fall they were looking 
for acorns, just as they do now in 
the southern states. So the town 
ordered that they should wear a yoke 
and have a ring in the nose. 

It must have been difficult to 
make a yoke stay on a pig and manv 
were careless about it; so John 
Stewart, the blacksmith, was given 
power to catch every stray pig that 
was not yoked and rung, and then 
having put a yoke on his neck and 
a ring in his nose, to collect pay of 




44 HISTORY OF SPUING FIELD 

the owner. A man who looked after swine in this way was 
called a hogreeve and for a long period hogreeves were 
annually chosen. There were also officers called field drivers, 
who were to take to the town pound any horse or cow- 
found straying, especially if doing damage. The pound 
was on the northwestern part of what is now Court Square 
and w-as in charge of a pound-keeper. In after years it was 
on the spot where now Pleasant street is located. 

Another duty of the selectmen was that of perambulation. 
Perambulation is a very long word for a very long walk 
which is sometimes necessary in order to set right the bound- 
ary lines of a town. In our time, upon every road leading out 
of Springfield, except where the boundary is a river, may be 
found a substantial stone, marking the division between the 
city and the next town ; but in early times the lines were 
marked in a very rude way and on the occasion of one perambu- 
lation the book of the town records reads that "we first marked 
a little white oak by a pine stump, then next the bottom of 
the hill we marked a pine staddle and laid stones upon a rock 
and just over the brook we marked an ash staddle and then 
next a pine tree standing on the south side of the county 
road and laid a heap of stones on a flat rock in the road." 

This custom, known as "beating the bounds," the settlers 
brought from the old country where perambulation from very 
ancient days had been attended with great ceremony. The 
lord of the manor, with a large banner borne before him. 
priests in white gowns and with crosses carried aloft and 
others with bells and banners, followed by many people, 
walked in procession around the bounds of the entire parish, 
singing and stopping to take refreshments and having a gala 
time generally. The procession kept to the exact bounds 
through fields and even directly through a dooryard, or 



THE SETTLEMENT 



45 



even a house, if it stood on the hne. If a river formed the 
boundary, the procession walked along the shore, while some 
of the party stripped off their clothes and swam alongside, 
or, if the stream was navigable, some persons rowed along in 
boats. Sometimes boys were thrown into it at certain places. 
When a wall, or tree, or post was near the line, boys were 
swung against it and bumped. These were called "bumping 
places" and when the boys became old men their testimony, 
as to the location of the line, was considered especially valuable, 
as to any point where they had been bumped. PeramVjulation 
of town boundaries is still the law in Massachusetts; but the 
towns were too large and the people too full of serious work 
for ceremony and the woods and swamps too numerous to 
make perambulation anything more than an occasional attempt 
to see that the bounds were all right. 

In the beginning of the previous chapter it was said that 
William Pynchon was the founder of Springfield and that 
he was good, and wise and kind. We must now return to him. 
While John and Mary Pynchon are growing up to manhood 
and womanhood, he has remained the chief man of the planta- 
tion. He was the richest man in it, in fact, the only man 
who had any considerable wealth. He 
had the most land and the most cattle. 
Of the cattle, Mrs. Pynchon took the 
immediate charge, and if she was like 
many farmers' wives of the early times, 
she had a good many cows to milk with 
her own hands and some of the churn- 
ing to do. Her husband, though a 
planter, was more prominently a mer- 
chant and had to spend much time in 
fur trade with the Indians and seeing 




46 HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 

to the importation from Boston or Europe of things that the 
settlers needed and could not make. Besides, he owned 
the mills which ground the com and sawed the logs on 
Mill river. 

And then, again, he was obliged to spend much time in the 
public service, because he was the man best fitted to do it, 
as everybody acknowledged. He was the judge before whom 
all the people brought their disputes for trial at law. He was. 
a member of the General Court, which met at Boston and 
made laws for the whole colony. Although he lived away up 
here, several days' journey through the woods from Boston, 
he was held responsible, as treasurer of the colony, for whatever 
money belonged to the Colonial government. 

It is a very important fact that the Indians, who, if they 
had been wrongfully treated might have caused much trouble, 
found in him one who would do exact justice between them 
and the whites. For fear of him as a judge, an Indian feared 
to wrong a white man and because of him and his just ways, 
in trade they liked to deal with the white man. Pynchon 
feared no man ; but he feared God and was a man of good will 
toward men. When the people met for town business it was 
he who was always chosen to preside. He lived in a wooden 
house on the spot which would now be the corner of Main and 
Fort streets and next north was the house of his trusted 
friend, Thomas Cooper. Posterity is fortunate in the existence 
of a portrait of him, painted from life. It is now in the Essex 
Institute, at Salem. He is the only citizen of Springfield, in 
its first century, the likeness of whose face is known. 

Like many good men who are called upon, by their high 
position, to do difficult things and sometimes to oppose the 
wishes of other people in doing them, there were those who 
did not understand and admire William Pynchon. But they 



THE PYNCHON FAMILY 47 

did not live in Springfield. Some of them lived in Hartford. 
At a certain time, when grain was very scarce, it was necessar}' 
for the people of Hartford, Windsor and this plantation to 
buy com of the Indians. Mr. Pynchon was given power, by 
all the towns of the valley below, to buy com for them all at 
a certain price and if he could not buy it at the price, to offer 
more. The Indians held off and would not sell at a price that 
was reasonable. Mr. Pynchon did not buy; he thought it 
not best that the Indians should know of the weakness of the 
colonists; and he did not wish to disturb the market price 
for com, feeling that this would be bad, not only for his own 
trade with them in the future, but for all the colonists. He 
believed in suffering some present loss, in order to keep a 
lasting gain. The people of Springfield believed with him, 
but those of Hartford did not. 

Both towns were suffering for lack of grain, and the cattle 
were getting poor, — Mr. Pynchon's, like those of everybody 
else. Still Pynchon stood firm. He felt that the white man 
must be firm and self- sufficient in presence of the savage; 
and there were Indians up and down the valley who had done 
much injury to the whites in the Pequot war and might, and 
in fact did, later, do more. Connecticut had conquered the 
Indians with the sword, but Pynchon believed in the arts of 
peace. He believed in suffering for the sake of peace; in 
getting people to do the things they ought to or the things 
that one wants them to do, of their own free will and not by 
force. Springfield was more exposed to dangers of the Indians 
and to the evil results of disturbing the regular course of trade 
with them than Hartford. 

So Springfield and Hartford differed about this matter and 
Hartford sent up Captain Mason, a famous Indian fighter, 
with money in one hand and sword in the other, as it were. 



48 HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 

He was ready to give a higher price for the corn or to fight the 
Indians if they would not sell. They felt obliged to yield. 
Mr. Pynchon suffered many hard words from Hartford and 
Windsor about the matter, but Massachusetts stood by him, 
as especially did his own town, and in his honor the name of 
the plantation was changed from Agawam to Springfield, 
which was the name of his old home in England. In the parish 
church of old Springfield may be seen an ancient tablet 
bearing his name as one of the church wardens. 

After this Mr. Pynchon again found himself in difficulties 
with the neighboring colony. That colony had a fort at the 
mouth of the river, kept for protection against the Indians 
and Dutch, and insisted that Pynchon 's boats should pay 
toll when they passed it. The tolls were to go towards its 
maintenance. This Mr. Pynchon would have been willing to 
do if both Massachusetts and Connecticut could have had 
control of the fort ; but he did not relish the idea of taxation 
without representation, an idea against which all the colonies 
afterwards revolted and thus brought on the Revolution. 
So he refused to pay toll. Massachusetts stood by him and 
required a toll on Connecticut ships sailing into Boston harbor. 
Then Connecticut gave way. 

But now came real trouble for William Pynchon ; for even 
Massachusetts, except Springfield, turned against him. Wil- 
liam Pynchon was not only a man of wisdom and peace but 
of godliness. For this reason he thought and studied much 
on the goodness of God to his children and the duty that they 
owed to Him. He loved and studied the Bible and had his 
own thoughts about it. Here in his house on Main street he 
wrote a book which he got printed in London and which gave 
his thoughts on these things. It was called "The Meritorious 
Price of Our Redemption." 



THE PYNCHON FAMILY 



49 



Some copies of this book came to America and three copies 
are still in existence, one of them in the Boston Athenaeum. 
Because this book was, in some respects, contrary to the 
opinions then held, it caused much excitement, particularly 
in Boston and the neighboring towns. The General Court 
condemned it. By order of this court the book was publicly 
burned in Boston and its author remo\'ed from his position 
of judge at Springfield. 







»f'-r>r' 



HlKNlNC. oh P\N<H(JN ]'.<IOK. 



All these unhappy results of Mr. Pynchon's desire to set 
before the world what he believed to be the truth were a 
serious blow to him. He had the best intentions and, perhaps, 
supposed that his efforts to do good would be met with a 
spirit of kindliness. On the other hand he found himself 



50 HISTORY OF SPRIXGFIELT) 

punished and in the way of continued persecution. For 
himself he might have endured this. Already there had been 
thorns as well as roses in his path. Founding a settlement 
in the wilderness and being mainly responsible for its safety 
and happiness had not been easy. Yet he was not a man 
who would sacrifice the public's interests for his own. He 
apparently thought that though the settlement would suffer 
somewhat if he left it, yet, under all the circumstances, the 
responsibility had better be thrown on younger men, after 
his own leadership had become so much interfered with as, 
perhaps, to be an embarrassment to his fellow townsmen. 
Looking back from the long future and in view of the after 
career of his eldest son, who was early thrown upon his own 
resources, it really does seem that William Pynchon chose, for 
Springfield, what was the wisest course, in deciding to return 
to England, which he did in the year 1652. With him went 
his friend and minister, Mr. Moxon, and his own daughter 
Sarah, with her husband, Henry Smith. Thus ended the public 
career of one of the truly great colonial leaders, to whose 
character and the character of those whom he naturally drew 
about him, much of the stability and purity of the public and 
private life of Springfield has always been, and let us hope^ 
for a long time to come, will be due. When Springfield learns 
what she owes to him. his statue will be seen in one of her 
public places. 

It was a dark day for Springfield when W'ilham Pynchon, 
Mr. Moxon and Henry Smith set out to spend the rest of their 
lives in England. It was the loss of the leaders. Other and 
younger men must now be called upon and it remains to be 
seen how well they would fulfill their duties. As it turned 
out, there were good men and true to do what the lost leaders, 
had done, namely, to work together for tlie good of the town. 



THE PYNCHON FAMILY 



51 



As we look back we see that of these men, the four most 
prominent were John Pynchon, Samuel Chapin, Elijah Hol- 
yoke and Thomas Cooper. Others there were who worked 
loyally with them. Deacon Chapin and Thomas Cooper we 
know already as selectmen. Who was Elijah Holyoke? In 
answering this last question we will take our last glimpse of 
Mary Pynchon. Hers is the first girl's name of any we know 
among the very first settlers and we could wish that more 
^^ was known about her. When 

she came from England she was 
about the age of the girl in this 
picture. Soon after she had crossed 
the ocean to the New World her 
own mother died and it was after 
her father had married again that 
she came to Springfield. As she 
grew into girlhood so attractive 
was she that when she was but 
fifteen years of age Elijah Hol- 
yoke of Hartford asked for her to 
be his wife. Her father giving his consent, 3^oung Holyoke 
removed to Springfield and they lived happily together for 
seventeen years until her death. 

In Holland's story "The Bay Path," there is much that 
is imaginary about Mary Pynchon, but aside from what is here 
told, scarcely anything more is known than is contained on 
the stone at her grave in the cemeterv: 




<iW^ ^-=:rr3S= 



Upon a bank of violets sweet. 

Shakespeare. 



" She that lies here was, while she stood, 
A very glory of womanhood." 



It was for either her husband or her son. Captain Holyoke, 
that the mountain was named. 



52 



HISTORY OF SIM{IX(; FIELD 



But the hopes of the town might well have been placed on 
John Pynchon, who had many of his father's qualities of 
character and some others that were equally useful. Though 
bom in England, he was but a boy when, after the long ocean 
voyage, he first saw the New World, and he grew up truly an 
American. Perhaps he could not, like his father, read the 
Bible in the original Hebrew ; and he may have known nothing 
of Latin and Greek, all of 
which William Pynchon 
had learned at the Uni- 
versity of Oxford. It 
may be, too, that his 
father had taught him 
something of these things. 
There is good reason for 
supposing that he was 
studious as a boy and 
when he became a young 
man he was so much of a 
scholar that he was some- 
times expected to preach 
a sermon of his own writ- 
ing in the years when 
the people met for wor- 
ship, with(mt any min- 
ister. On other occa- 
sions, Deacon Chapin or another would read a printed ser- 
mon of some clergyman. 

But John Pynchon had other training which was, perhaps, 
more useful to Springfield. He had grown up alongside the 
Indian boys who lived on Long Hill and the Agawam side 
and well knew the Indian character. This, in the trying times 




THE PYNCHON FAMILY .53 

that afterwards arose with the Indians was of much conse- 
quence. Sometimes he was called upon to settle differences 
between the Indians and other settlements, even as far west 
as Albany. The Indians called him "brother Pynchon." No 
likeness of him remains, as boy or man. In those days of 
hard struggle for a livelihood, probably none was ever made, 
but the picture on the previous page shows how he might have 
looked, in his earlier years, studious boy as he was. 

As the successor of his father, John Pynchon became the 
great merchant and trader of the valley. His vessels went 
dowm the river with merchandise to be landed at his own 
wharf in Boston. As an incident of his extensive operations 
with the Indians and others he furnished a good deal of work 
to the women and children of Springfield by giving them 
shells to string into wampum at a given price per fathom. 
These shells were either white or blue-black and were gathered 
by Indians on the shores of Long Island. Having been duly 
shaped they were sent to vSpringfield to Pynchon and sold to 
him by the bushel. On being strung they became wampum, 
the money of the Indians, and also to a large extent of the 
settlers. Their value arose from the fact that they were so 
much used by the Indians for ornaments, just as the value 
of gold arises from the fact that, worthless as it is in the most 
useful arts, it is universally in demand for jewelry and, like 
the peculiar wampum shells, \'ery scarce as compared with 
other metals. From a study of John Pynchon's account books, 
the historian, Judd, has stated that over 20,000 fathoms of 
wampum were strung by the women and children of this 
vicinity. As six feet make one fathom we have a string of 
beads which would reach from Court Square in Springfield 
through West Springfield to the Holyoke City Hall and back 
again through Chicopee. 



54 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 




Besides being merchant and preacher, John Pynchon was 
also the recorder or register of deeds, the presiding officer in 
town meeting and the captain of the train band. He was 
also the judge before whom suits at law were tried and by 
whom law breakers were sentenced. There were some laws 
that he had to execute and some punishments that he had to 
inflict that seem strange to us. An 
ordinary punishment was standing 
in the stocks, an instrument of 
discomfort so put together that 
the feet, arms and neck of the cul- 
prit were pinned to a fixed position 
and his face exposed to public 
ridicule. The whipping post, even 
down to a late period, was a promi- .stocks. 

nent object on the street and to it some of the wrong-doers 
were tied and whipped on the bare back. One of the rules of 
the army of Massachusetts w^as that, if any soldier should 
blaspheme, his tongue should be bored with a hot iron; but 
probably this punishment was not inflicted. Men were fined 
for wearing long hair and women were fined for wearing better 
clothes than they could afl'ord. 

One of the most interesting trials that ever took place in 
Springfield occurred in the last years in which Judge William 
Pynchon held Court. It was the trial of Hugh Parsons for 
witchcraft. In England many thousand people had been 
hanged because they were thought to be witches in league with 
the evil one to injure others. In Springfield this suspicion fell 
on Hugh Parsons, whose house was at the south end of the 
street, near Mill river. 

Witches were always supposed to be ugly in appearance. 
Parsons was not a very agreeable man and probably not good 



WITCHCRAFr 



looking. He was a brick mason and used to wear a red coat. 
Having, for some reason, got provoked with Blanche Bedortha, 
he said to her, " Gammer, I shall remember you when you little 
think on it." Parsons probably forget all about it, but no so 
Blanche Bedortha. She kept thinking of him and wondering 
if he was casting the evil eve upon her. Evervthing strange 




WiTCHEti 



that happened she laid to Hugh Parsons aided by the devil. 
She looked out on the marsh, w^here Mill river entered the 
Connecticut and saw strange lights. No doubt it was innocent 
" Will-o-the-Wisp." One night, when she went to bed in the 
dark, some sparks came from her flannel waistcoat, such 
little sparks as electricity brings in cold weather. But she 
knew nothing of phosphorescence and electricity ; neither did 
her neighbors; so they began to think that Hugh Parsons 
was really a witch. The belief spread up the street, encouraged 
by every trifling coincidence. Parsons called at Mr. Edwards' 
house for milk and soon after the cow dried up. George 
Lancton took a bag pudding out of the pot and, laying it on 




" An, AX'iioi! All, WiTci 



WITCHCRAFT 57 

the table, it separated right in the middle. Jonathan Taylor 
dreamed that he saw snakes on the floor and that one of them 
with a black and yellow stripe hit him on the forehead, when 
a voice like that of Parsons seemed to cry " Death." 

By this time the excitement was great and Parsons was 
arrested. As the constable was taking him past the house 
of Goody Stebbins, (where is now the southeast comer of 
Court Square), on the way to Judge Pynchon's, she cried out, 
"Ah, witch! Ah, witch!" and fell in a fit. At the hearing 
before the Court it was decided that, on account of the im- 
portance of the case, Parsons must be sent to Boston where 
he would be tried on the charge of having "had familiar and 
wicked converse with the devil." His trial was accordingly 
held there and he was convicted by the jury, but he was 
finally acquitted by the General Court. Naturally he never 
returned to Springfield. In the picture the course of the 
town brook is seen and, in the distance, the wooded heights 
of the upper terrace from Crescent Hill to Fort Pleasant avenue. 

John Pynchon, the first judge, the fair recorder, the honest 
dealer, the able manager with the Indians, the godly teacher 
in a pulpit that had no minister, lived through all the events 
narrated in the next two chapters. In these he appears as the 
brave captain, major and colonel. "Major" was the title by 
which he came to be generally known. As he grew old such 
was the respect in which he was held and the gratitude that 
in the dark days when his father and mother had left the 
plantation, he had remained to be its protector, leader and 
friend, that he is described in the old records as " the worship- 
ful Major," "the worshipful Colonel" and as "the worshipful 
Major Pynchon, Esquire." His residence was in a house which 
stood on Main street, near the comer of the present Fort street, 
a house of brick, built by him and designed parth^ for defence 



58 



HISTORY OF SPHINGFIELl) 



in war, so that it came at 
last to be known as ' ' the 
old fort." Attached to the 
rear of it was a part of the 
old wooden building in 
which his father lived. 

The old fort stood until *> 
1831, but nothing remains 
of these relics of the past, 
except a box made from 
the wood of the wooden 
house and a hinge from one 
of its doors. These are 
the property of the Con- 
necticut Valley Historical 
Society. Major Pynchon. 
honored and loved, lived to 
a good old age and died in 
1703. A good picture of liis 
house is given on this page 
in the book plate of the 
Historical Society. The view 

behind the house as in old times takes in the river and the 
West Springfield meadows. Besides the Indian and the Puritan, 
the steeple of the First church is seen from another point of 
view, with Mount Tom in the distance. The plate was designed 
by Clare (lardncr, once a pupil of the S])ringfiel(l schools. 




CHAPTER IV. 



KING PHILIP'S WAR AND ITS CAUSES.— BATTLES AND 
BURNINGS IN THE CONNECTICUT VALLEY. 

UP TO the time at which we have now arrived there had 
been peace between the colonies of Massachusetts Bay 
and Plymouth on the one hand and the various Indian 
tribes on the other. In the Connecticut colony there had been 
a war so bitterly waged by the whites, aided by their allies, 
the Mohegan Indians, that it had resulted in the utter destruc- 
tion of the Pequot tribe. 
The Pequot war happened 
about the time of the settle- 
ment of Springfield and though 
it made the settlers in this 
part of the valley very cau- 
tious in dealing with the In- 
dians, and taught them that 
they lived in the midst of 
danger, yet nothing hostile 
occurred. Massasoit, the fa- 
mous chief of the Wampa- 
noags, was a neighbor of the 
Plvmouth colonists and had 
always been their friend. The 
Narragansetts, wlio lived in 
Rhode Island, influenced by 
the good will of Roger Wil- 
liams for them, liad kept the 
peace after the close of the Pequot war. 




King Philip. 
From "Indian History for YounK Folks" 
Francis S. Drake. Copyright 1884 by Harper 
and Bros. 



by 



60 HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 

The tribes of the interior,— those Hving in what is now 
Worcester county and in that part of the valley extending 
from Hartford to Northampton, — were known by the general 
name of Nipmucks or " fresh water" Indians. They were small 
tribes, apparently independent of each other, and having each 
a chief, or sachem, who was advised by a few others of the 
most knowing of the tribe called Sagamores. The Indians 
who lived at the mouth of the Agawam, and had their fort, 
where, perhaps, they spent the winter, on Long Hill, were 
called the Agawams. They were about two hundred in 
number and their sachem was Wequogan. 

It was only natural that when the whites of these colonies 
were so few in number they should make every effort to make 
friends with the Indians. Possessed as they were with fire- 
arms and the arts of civilization they were but weak, living 
in a wilderness among so many savages. Besides, they were 
taught by their religion that the Indian was a brother man 
to whom it was their duty to bring the blessings of the white 
man's religion. 

There were men like John Eliot and Daniel Brainerd, who 
suffered great hardships and underwent much toil in order to 
get the Indians to accept Christianity. In fact they were 
reasonably successful, for in fifty years after the Pilgrims 
had landed on Plymouth rock, there were as many as two 
thousand "praying Indians." Some of these were sincerely 
religious but all were called "praying Indians" who had begun 
to desert savage life and attached themselves in friendship 
and service to the whites, showing a willingness to leani the 
civilized way of living. They afterwards showed their good 
will by taking English names. There was, for example, in 
the Plymouth colony an Indian named Toto, who went by 
the name of Sam Barrow, probably because of his friendly 



KING PHILIP'S WAR 61 

connection with a family of that name. Massasoit took his 
two boys, Wamsutta and Metacomet, to the governor, re- 
questing that they be given EngUsh names. They were 
therefore named respectively, Alexander and Philip. It was 
this Philip who figures so largely in this and the succeeding 
chapter. 

But, sad to relate, not all the whites were good to the 
Indians. Many bad men came to America and settled in the 
colonies. William Pynchon and his companions realized what 
might be the evil results of this in various ways and for many 
years no one was allowed to settle in Springfield who was not 
acceptable to the town. For a new settler someone had to 
become responsible that he would behave himself. In the 
seacoast towns this was not so easy. Consequently troubles 
arose and the whites sometimes bore themselves proudly 
towards the Indians. This, of course, irritated the Indians, 
for they felt that they had courteously allowed the whites to 
settle in their country and were entitled to respectful treatment. 
Here is an example of what happened. 

There was a sachem named Squando, chief of the Soko- 
nokis and a man of nobility and character. One day his wife 
was paddling down the river Saco in a canoe with her infant 
child. Some English sailors, coming along in a boat, said that 
they had heard that Indian children could swim like young 
ducks, and proceeded to upset the canoe. The child sank, 
at once, to the bottom of the river; the mother, by diving, 
brought it up, but although alive, it died shortly after. This, 
of course, was an extreme case but it illustrates the%vicked 
way in which the more ignorant or grosser members of a 
superior race sometimes look down upon and annoy those of 
a weaker race. 



62 HIS'] ORY OF SPRINGFIELD 

There were also, on the part of the Indians, those things 
that annoyed the whites. The Indians were inclined to thiev- 
ing; neither did they feel the importance of telling the truth. 
A long training in civilized life had taught the whites that 
truth telling is not only right but that without it business 
cannot well go on. The mind of a savage does not understand 
this ; so that, as was said by Mr. Moxon, the first minister of 
this town, "An Indian's promise is like taking a pig by the 
tail." 

But without regard to the right and the wrong in the 
character of the white man or the red man, there was another 
cause, perhaps enough in itself, to lead at some time to a 
union of Indians against the whites, provided any leader 
should appear great enough to unite them. The whites came 
more and more to possess the land. It is true that they bought 
it of the Indians and at a price that seemed fair to both parties ; 
but, all the same, the Indians saw their hunting grounds dis- 
appearing and the game growing more scarce. They were 
trained to hunt and not to dig ; all the com was raised by the 
women. Besides, if the praying Indians kept on increasing, 
the true glory, as they understood it, of the Indian character 
would be gone. No more war; no more scalping; no more 
of that wild life which they so thoroughly enjoyed. Instead 
of Indian braves there would only be peaceable Indian farmers. 
Today there are, on the Indian reser\'ations, farmers, pros- 
perous and happy, having pianos and sewing machines in 
their comfortable homes; but an Indian, of colonial days, 
if he could have foreseen this as possible, would not have had 
it so, simply because he was bom a wild Indian in a wigwam. 
A tame fox may be petted and well fed, but a wild fox, half 
starved, as he generally is, would never choose to become 
a tame one. 



KING PHILIP'S WAR 63 

So, after fifty years had passed since the settlement of 
Plymouth, the Indians were reasoning among themselves in 
this way: " Now is our time. If we do not at once unite our 
scattered tribes and destroy the English, they will, in the end, 
starve us out. They will soon grow so powerful that resist- 
ance would be hopeless. It is true that we cannot fight as 
they do. They have plenty of firearms and we must depend 
partly on our bows and arrows, but then we need not meet 
them in open battle. We can worry them out, we can shoot 
and poison their cattle, bum their houses and bams, and lie 
in wait for them in their fields and in the forest paths. When 
the men are away from home we can tomahawk the women 
and children. They may be more numerous than we are, but, in 
this way, we can in time destroy them all or drive them back 
whence they came." 

Som.e of the old sagamores gave different counsel, but this 
was the spirit that possessed the younger men of the tribes 
in Massachusetts. The disastrous Pequot war in Connecticut 
had taught the Mohegans that such reasonings were in vain 
and, under the leadership of the wily Uncas, they had been 
for a long tim.e the allies of the English and were prepared 
to join with them even in war against their own race. 

To bring all this unfriendly feeling against the whites to 
a head, there was needed a warrior, who by his personal 
qualities, could unite under him the various tribes. »Such a 
man was Metacomet, Massasoit's son, called Philip by the 
English. He had now become chief of the Wampanoags 
and was thoroughly convinced of the importance of making a 
stand against the whites. He is known in history as King 
Philip, and indeed, he had many kingly qualities. He was 
large in stature, of commanding appearance, agile and swift- 
footed as any Indian brave, and of superb muscular training. 



64 HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 

As a leader he was quick to see and to do; and what he did 
not think safe or wise for himself to do he knew how to set 
others on doing. 

After war was once begun he would appear, now in south- 
eastern Massachusetts, now in Rhode Island and all at once in 
the Connecticut valley, like an angel of death, unseen in his 
coming or going, but his presence always recognized by the 
sign of burning villages and slaughtered English. He was, 
like other Indians, treacherous; yet, toward those who had 
befriended him personally, he proved, in the war, to be kind 
and magnanimous. Before an attack on a certain town, he 
directed that two small children of an old friend, should be 
spared; and he would not let Scituate be destroyed because 
in that town lived a family of Leonards who had befriended 
him. 

Perhaps nothing could make Phihp more impressive than 
he was by nature; nevertheless on state occasions, it was his 
habit to assume a certain splendor of decoration. One of his 
decorations was a belt about ten feet long which went over 
his shoulders and being brought forward, hung down before 
him, nearly to his feet. It was embroidered with black and 
white wampum in figures of beasts, birds and flowers. Still 
another belt embroidered was placed on the head and hung 
down behind, and a third, ornamented with the figure of a 
star, was worn on the breast. These belts were edged with 
the red fur of some animal. 

The war began in June, 1675, within Plymouth colony, 
not far from Mount Hope, Phihp's residence. Several villages 
were laid waste and some soldiers killed; but on the whole, 
thanks to the vigilance of Captain Church, a skillful Indian 
fighter, Philip was not very successful; so that he and his 
warriors were fortunate in escaping to the region of the 



KING PHILIP'S WAR 



65 



Connecticut valley, where the settlements, being more sepa- 
rated, could be easier attacked. 

It was in early August that a horseman came riding in hot 
haste into the Main street of Springfield, announcing to the 
excited inhabitants that their neighbors of Brookfield, thirty 

miles away, were in great dis- 
tress. The horseman was 
Judah Trumbull. He had 
k^ft Springfield but a few hours 
before. Arriving at Brook- 
field he had found the village 
m fiames and the villagers 
?nned up in a single house, 
--, ~- ^_ fighting for 

their lives 
^ against a horde 
of savages who 
were besieging 
it. Concealing 

himself, Trumbull crept up near enough to take in the situ- 
ation, then rushed to Springfield, as fast as his horse 
could carry him. 

Lieutenant Cooper immediately raised a troop of horse- 
men and hurried to Brookfield. On arriving he found that 
help had just come from another source. The Brookfield 
people were saved; but sad was their story. They had all, 
eighty-three in number, including women and children, 
gathered in a fortified house. To this the Indians tried to set 
fire in the hope of killing the inmates as they rushed out. 
To this end hay and fagots were piled against the side of the 
house and fired ; but the blaze was put out from within. 
Blazing arrows were then shot upon the roof; but holes were 




.luDAH Trumbull's Ride. 



66 



lllSrOKY OF SPRINGFIELD 



cut in the roof and the fire put out. More water being wanted, 
a man who went to the well after it was shot. A woman, 
too, was killed by a bullet that entered through a loophole 
made for firing a musket from within. In a last effort to fire 
the house the Indians got a cart, lengthened the tongue or 
pole by splicing on other poles and, loading it with combus- 
tibles, set it on fire. Then they tried to push it against the 




The Att.^ck on Brookfield. 

house, l)ut one wheel getting caught in a i-ut, the; cart turned 
round and exposed those who pushed it to shots from the 
house. .V shower, just then coming up, extinguished the fire. 
Brookfield having been destroyed, it was naturally to be 
expected that Philip would now give his attention to the 
settlements up and down the valley. None knew whose turn 
would come next. Springfield was no longer the northern 
settlement. Above were Hadley and Northampton, Hatfield 



KING PHILIP'S WAR 67 

and Deerfield, and still further north, Northfield, the most 
exposed of all. The only settlement to the west, in the valley, 
was Westfield. Of all the forces in the valley Major Pynchon 
had command, and in each town of course there was a military 
company. In his plans Major Pynchon showed more wisdom 
than the commissioners of the united colonies, who had 
general charge of the war. He proposed to disarm the peaceful 
Indians, like the Agawams, before they had a chance to do 
mischief. 

It was decided first to disarm the Nonotucks who lived 
near Northampton. For this purpose, two companies, imder 
Captain Lathrop and Captain Beers, after relieving Brookfield. 
were marching thence northwards when they overtook the 
enemy near Mount Sugarloaf. The Indians suddenly stopped, 
plunged into a swamp, and poured a volley of bullets into 
the English. Into the swamp rushed the troops and, shelter- 
ing themselves behind trees, they and the savages fought for 
three hours. In this, the battle of Hopewell Swamp, a number 
were killed on both sides. 

Then followed an attack on Deerfield and next on North- 
field, under the command of Sagamore Sam and One-Eyed 
John. Some of the inhabitants of Northfield were killed and 
eventually the settlement was abandoned for the rest of the 
war. While Captain Beers and his company were marching 
to the relief of Northfield they fell into an ambush. An 
ambush was a favorite mode of warfare with Indians. They 
would carefully pick out some narrow passage, through which 
they believed their enemy would go, where, concealing them- 
selves behind rocks and trees, and waiting until the enemy 
were so far in the pass as to make retreat difficult, they would 
make a sudden and deadly onslaught. Captain Beers and his 
force were thus caught while they were crossing a brook. 



68 



IIIS'IOJIY OF SPRINGFIELD 



Thrown at first into confusion, they finally rallied and fought 
their way out of the ravine. Then on a slope of a hill, now 
known as Beers mountain, they made a last desperate resist- 
ance; but the Captain and most of his company were killed. 
A few days afterwards, when Major Treat came along, he saw 
the heads of the slain stuck on poles by the travelled path, 
the sign and threat of Indian vengeance. 

About the middle of September Captain Appleton with his 






company were 
^'J marching from 
:v3 Deerfield to 
t r Hadley. In the 
?I neighborhood of 
:I Mount Sugarloaf 
; - they stopped by 

"e a brook to pick 

'-'-4 

f^. the wild grapes 

W^ that hung 
,i<:jU> temptingly on 
■" ' -' " the vines about 
them. It was 
an excellent 
place for an am- 
bush and the 
Indians well 
knew it. No sooner were the troops scattered and their 
arms laid aside than the very bushes seemed on fire from 
the guns of, perhaps, hundreds of Indians, Pocumtucks, 
Nonotucks, Nashaways, Squakheags, led by Sagamore Sam, 
One-Eyed John, Muttaump, and, quite likely, Philip himself. 
The slaughter was well nigh complete. Almost the only person 
who escaped had thrown himself into the bed of the brook 




Tliis cut is from "The Little Readers Assistant," by 
Noah Webster, author of the Dictionary. It shows the 
clever escape of an Indian ally of the whites who, being 
pursued by one of King Philip's men, hid behind a rock 
and, raising his headgear on the barrel of his gun, drew the 
fire of his enemy. To reload the gun, a flint lock, took so 
much time that the first Indian escaped. 



KING PHILIP'S WAR 



69 



and pulled the bushes over him. Although stepped on by 
more than one Indian, he lay quiet until all was over. This 
conflict is known as the battle of Bloody Brook. A monument 
near by now marks the burial place of the slain. 




Cradle of the Pvnchon Family, now in the Old Day House. 



70 HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



THE STATUE OF THE PURITAN IN MERRICK PARK 

With sober foot unswerving, lip severe, 

And lid that droops to shield the inner sight; 
Dark-browed, stern- willed, a shadow in the light 

Of alien times, and yet no alien here; 

Revered and dreaded, loved, but yet with fear; 
He moves, the somber shade of that old night 
Whence grew our morn, the ghost of that grim might 

Tliat nursed to strength the Nation's youth austere. 

Mark the grave thought that lines the hollow cheek, 

The hardy hand that guards the sacred book. 

The sinewy limb, and what the thin lips speak 

Of iron will to mould the era — look 

In reverence, and as ye mutely scan 

The heroic figure, see, rough-limned, a man! 

— Wkitnwre, 1852- 




/~ '~^^ 



.':; \ 







The Indian Stockade on Long Hill as it Probably Appeared, Looking S. E. 

CHAPTER V. 



KING PHILIP'S WAR CONTINUED —THE BIRNING OF 

SPRINGFIELD.— CAPT. HOLYOKE AND THE FALLS 

FIGHT— CLOSE OF IHE WAR. 

THE war was by this time well begun throuij^hout the two 
colonies. The upper settlements of the Connecticut 
seemed to be at the mercy of the savages. They were 
now gathering in the neighborhood of Hadley, which appar- 
ently was to be the next point of attack. It was to Hadley 
therefore that the English soldiers were sent. Major Pynchon 
believed that some troops should nevertheless be left in the 



72 HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 

other settlements for fear of a surprise ; but the commissioners 
of the colonies made the mistake of not taking his advice. 
In another respect he was overruled. With his usual fore- 
sight and knowledge of Indian character he had suggested 
that the Agawams should be deprived of their firearms and a 
permanent guard placed in their fort. They were as yet 
peaceable and, being few in number, it could have been 
easily done. But he was obliged to content himself with taking 
a few hostages, who were then sent by him to Hartford for 
safer keeping. 

The gathering of troops at Hadley of course required 
Major Pynchon's presence there as commander of the army 
in the valley, and in accordance with orders he felt obliged to 
take with him nearly all the able-bodied men. Scarcely any 
men were left in the town, except a few old men, like Deacon 
Chapin, who was then in his last sickness, and boys under 
eighteen. 

Springfield's defenceless condition and iinportance gave 
Philip his opportunity. Through spies he knew what was 
going on. The blow was not to fall on Hadley, after all. To 
join forces with the Agawams, in the Long Hill stockade, 
was easy. He had only to hurry his light-footed braves down 
the line of the desolate Wilbraham hills and no one would be 
the wiser till it was too late. The farm houses of the open 
country were few and scattered and the occupants had 
fled into the villages for protection. 

By what defences had Springfield been made ready for an 
Indian onslaught? JMajor Pynchon and his fellow townsmen 
had their own way in this respect and they were fairly prepared. 
The Pynchon house, by its construction, being of brick with 
walls two feet in thickness, was in itself a good defence. 
There were two other houses in the lower part of the street. 




KING PHILIP'S WAR 73 

which, although built of wood, were especially protected 
against assault. Into these the inhabitants could flee. The 
ordinary means of garrisoning houses was by palisades. 

A palisade was made in this way. Trees of convenient size 
were cut to such a length that when 
placed firmly in the ground they would 
rise above it to the length of ten or 
twelve feet. Having been roughly hewn 
to a post-like form, or, if the work was 
hurried, perhaps not hewn at all, they palisaded houses. 

were then set close together around the house to be protected. 
They were also fastened together by a rude rail, held, it may be, 
by nails or withes. Sometimes several houses, or as at North- 
ampton, a whole hamlet, were thus enclosed. Loopholes were 
made here and there through which those from within could 
fire at an approaching enemy without much danger that a 
bullet or arrow would enter the loophole itself. At the entrance 
of the stockade or palisaded place, one line of posts was made 
to overlap the line from the other direction at a distance just 
wide enough for a man to pass. The narrow passage could 
thus be easily defended. Of course, if the enemy could get 
upon a rock or tree in the near neighborhood, they could fire 
upon the house, so that occasionally some one was shot when 
opposite a window. Feather beds, as was the case in Brook- 
field, could be hung against the inside wall to deaden the 
bullets that might penetrate the wall itself. It was with 
palisades that the Long Hill fort was constructed and the 
settlers wisely adopted the Indian mode of defence. The 
Indian fort or stockade was situated on the spot where now 
stands the house of the Vincentian Fathers. When exca- 
vations for this building were made the ashes of the 



74 HISrOHY OF SPRIxNGFIKLI) 

ancient fires were uncovered and discolorations of the 
soil showed where the posts had been. 

It was into this fort on Long Hill that some of Philip's 
warriors secretly entered on a night in early October, 1675. 
There were among our local Indians only about forty fighting 
men. They were probably so peaceably disposed, by reason 
of their weakness, their familiar intercourse in the village, and 
the fair treatment which they had always had, that had it 
not been for the incitements of Philip, they might have taken 
no part in the war. They were nearer to Connecticut than 
the Indians of the upper valley and in the Pequot war the 
Connecticut Indians had been taught a severe lesson. But to 
destroy Springfield was part of Philip's plan; he needed the 
help of our Indians and his clever arts prevailed. 

On Monday, October 4th, Major Pynchon set out for Hadley 
with his men. His object was to locate the Indians harboring 
around there and bring on a decisive battle at once. Meantime, 
Indian braves who had fired Brookfield and other places, 
were secretly got into the Long Hill fort. The terrible disaster 
and slaughter of women and children that impended was only 
saved from making a bloody page of history by a single 
circumstance. The Agawam hostages were still in Hartford 
and their relatives probably insisted on their relief from 
certain death by getting them out of the hands of the whites 
before the expected attack. Had this not been done some 
Indian would have betrayed the whole plot. Accordingly 
some messengers were sent to Hartford, who in some way 
effected the escape of the hostages. In passing through 
Windsor, either going or coming, the messengers or the 
hostages happened to come across Toto, an Indian who lived 
in a white family. Toto became aware of the plot and as he 



KING PHILIP'S WAR 75 

showed great excitement about something, he revealed it, 
on being questioned. 

No time was to be lost. The fate of Springfield now hung 
on a family in Windsor, whose name we would be glad to know. 
A swift messenger was dispatched to the doomed town. 
Leaving his horse, probably, in West Springfield, and rousing 
the citizens there, he crossed on the ferry, with some of them, 
at dead of night. The alarm was given all down the street. 
The people fled at once to the fortified houses and a messenger 
was sent to Hadley after Major Pynchon. 

It is probable that the Indians intended to make the attack 
at night. The betrayal of their plot and the sudden rush of 
the people for safety may have disconcerted their plans 
At all events the morning broke with no sign of danger and 
some of the people went back to their homes. It was hard for 
them to believe that the Agawams had become their enemies. 

At this time the town was in command of Thomas Cooper, 
then known as Lieutenant Cooper. He no longer lived in his 
old place on Main street but fifteen years before had removed 
to that part of the town now known as Agawam and had a 
sawmill on Three Mile brook. He was an old man, but yet 
hale and hearty. He was not only a carpenter and farmer; 
he was something of a surgeon and in the absence of regular 
physicians, went far and near to set a broken bone. This he 
did in kindness and with no charge. In the absence of lawyers 
he also practiced before the courts. He was so often called 
to serve as selectman that he sought to avoid the office. 
He was particularly successful in dealing with the Indians 
and was probably personally acquainted with each one. 
Green, in his history, says that his descendants, of whom some 
still remain, may well place him beside Deacon Chapin as one 
of the pillars of the town. 



76 HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 

Another man besides Cooper, Chapin and the minister, 
who remained when the miUtia went to Hadley, was Thomas 
Miller. He was the constable and perhaps for that reason 
was left behind. Unlike Lieutenant Cooper, he was probably 
not on particularly good terms with the Indians. In his 
younger days he had, for some reason, struck old Reippumsick 
with the butt of his gun and the old man brought the younger 
one before Judge William Pynchon. As the matter was liable 
to lead to difficulties with the Indians, the judge called in 
several men, including the minister and Thomas Cooper, to 
sit with him as advisers. The result was that ]\Iiller was 
sentenced to be whipped at the public whipping post fifteen 
lashes, which, rather than undergo, he finally made his peace 
with the Indians by the payment of four fathoms of wampum. 
Perhaps unpleasant feelings remained on both sides, for ten 
years afterw^ards Miller complained to the court of KoUa- 
baugamitt, Mallamaug and other Indians for striking his wife 
and throwing sticks at his children; whereupon ten men 
riding hard on five horses were sent in pursuit of the fleeing 
Kollabaugamitt, Mallamaug and other assailants into the 
country of the Nipmucks. Kollabaugamitt and Mallamaug 
were caught and fined by the Court in fourteen fathoms of 
wampum. Although the Indians did not like Thomas Miller, 
yet, as he was constable and had been fence viewer, pound- 
keeper and committee on the allotment of new lands, he was 
evidently reckoned a worthy citizen. 

It is true that with the coming of the morning of the 
eventful day the people had returned to their homes. Most 
of them, of course, were women and children and the distress 
and anxiety must have been great. The defenders of the 
town had gone, and, although sent for, they might be unable 
to return. There may have been reports of strange Indians 



KING PHILIP'S WAR 



77 



seen about the fort, and with another night death and destruc- 
tion might be upon the village. At some hazard Lieutenant 
Cooper determined to resolve these doubts. Taking Thomas 
Miller with him, both mounted, they rode down the street in 
the direction of the fort. Arrived at some point not far from 
the bridge at Mill river, probably just across the stream 
where the road passes alongside the natural bank at the foot 




The Ambush of Lieutenant Cooper and Consj uu.k Mii.i.Ejt. 

of Long Hill, a shot was heard and then another. Miller was 
instantly killed. Cooper fell from his horse, but remounting, 
started up the street. Another shot made a mortal 
wound. He reached the nearest gamsoned house and gave 
the alarm, but immediately died. 

Much as Thomas Cooper had done for the town in his life, 
in his death he really saved it from a great slaughter, for the 



78 HISTORY (W SPRINGFIELD 

alarm was none too soon. The people had no sooner got into 
the fortified houses than the Indians, whooping and yelling, 
broke from the fort and were upon the town. 

"Alas, that direful yell, 
So loud, so wild, so shrill, so clear, 
As if the very fiends of hell, 
Burst from the wildwood depths, were here." 

As compared with an Indian warwhoop, the howling of a 
wolf or the cry of a panther had no terrors to the forefathers. 
At the head of the savage band were Philip's chosen braves, 
close followed by the more timid Agawams, armed with fire- 
arms and bows and an'ows. Some carried blazing pine knots, 
prepared to bum the houses, bams and haystacks. Thanks 
to the Windsor Indian, Lieutenant Cooper and the palisades, 
no one was killed in the mad rush up the street except Pente- 
cost Matthews, wife of the old town drummer, and Edmund 
Pringrydays, who was wounded and died a few days after. 
Some thirty houses were burned as were about twenty-five 
bams stored with fodder for the winter. Crossing the marsh, 
the enemy burned the house of correction, near the present 
comer of State and Maple streets. In a short time the whole 
town, from the mills on Mill river to upper Ferry Lane (Cypress 
street) was a burning, smoking ruin. Nothing escaped but 
the garrisoned houses, the meeting-house and one or two 
houses near it. Before being fired, the houses were plundered 
of their valuables. One Indian got a pewter platter, which 
holding up before his person, either in defence or defiance, an 
enraged townsman sent a bullet through both platter and 
Indian. The platter remained in the town for nearly two 
centuries. 

While the Indians were still in the village plundering and 
burning and looking for an opportunity to kill the besieged, 



KING PHILIP'S WAR 79 

Major Treat of Connecticut arrived on the West Springfield 
side of the river with a company of soldiers. Could they have 
got across, the Indians would have fled, but the latter kept 
them back. Major Pynchon, however, having got the message 
sent the night before, had set out in great haste with the Spring- 
field men, whose wives and children, mothers and sisters, 
were in the "sacked and burning village." Perspiring with 
exertion and anxiety, they at last arrived on the scene. Their 
approach was the signal for the retreat of the Indians. These 
hurried eastward across the plain and encamped for the night 
about six miles away, tradition says at Indian Orchard. 
The next day they plunged into the forest to the north. The 
Agawams, afterwards uniting themselves with other tribes 
to the west of the Hudson, became, as a separate tribe, forever 
lost to sight. Although now and then a wanderer appeared 
about the home of his childhood, never again did Springfield 
have a tribe of Indian neighbors. 

One old squaw was left in the hasty flight. Perhaps she 
tried to follow the tribe and fell behind because of her age. 
Captain Moseley of Boston, who was engaged in the army of 
the valley, but not in Springfield, declared that she was torn 
in pieces by dogs. If true, this heinous act requires explana- 
tion and apology. Perhaps only a few were responsible. The 
shocking barbarities of the Indians were beginning to arouse 
the colonists to a fearful revenge. Captive Indians, including 
Philip's wife and little son, were sold into slavery in the West 
Indies, and even in Plymouth the heads of slain Indians were 
exposed on poles. There is nothing, however, on the part of 
the whites as barbarous as an act of the Indians in roasting a 
captive and eating slices of his flesh while yet alive. 

The saintly Eliot, who had been a successful missionary 
to the Indians, tried, with others, to lessen the brutalities of 



80 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



war, so far as the whites were concerned, but without success. 
The Indians, however, had not so much feehng about this 
matter, even as concerned their own people, as one might 
expect. They looked upon death with a sort of indifference 
and probably felt that scalping and being scalped, burning 
alive and being burnt alive were a part of the glory of war. 
When Toto, mentioned in the fourth chapter (page 60), having 
himself killed nineteen whites, at last fell into the hands of 




Inhians Killing a White Captive. 
From Noah Webster's "Little Header's Assistant." 



Captain Church, he was told to prepare to die. He admitted 
that the sentence was just and said he was ashamed to live. 
He asked only the favor of being allowed to smoke a few whiff's 
of tobacco, which having done, he said he was ready. Then 
one of Captain Church's Indians sank a hatchet in his brains. 
At last winter began to set in, a time when even the Indians 
could not accomplisli much in the way of active warfare. 
Philip and his Wampanoags retired from this region and 
intrenched themselves in a swamp in the eastern part of the 



KING PHILIP'S WAR 81 

State, where they were attacked with great slaughter. But it 
was a sad state of things here in the valley, with Deerfield, 
Northfield and Springfield destroyed and only Hadley and 
Northampton remaining. Springfield was in great straits. 
The people huddled together in the few houses and bams that 
were left and some probably found shelter on the west side 
where there were some houses. Major Pynchon was much 
inconvenienced by the crowding of his own house and dis- 
tressed by his great loss of property, — his grist mills and saw 
mills destroyed and the people who owed him unable to pay. 
It seemed like the ruin of his fortune, yet this is the way he 
wrote to one of his children, then in London: 

"Dear Son: I would not have you troubled at these sad 
losses which I have met with. There is no reason for a child 
to be troubled when his father calls in that which he lent him. 
It was the Lord that lent it to me, and he that gave it hath 
taken it away, and blessed be the name of the Lord. He hath 
done very well for me, and I acknowledge his goodness, and 
desire to trust in Him and to submit to Him forever. And do 
you, with me, acknowledge and justify Him." 

There was some talk of abandoning Springfield. Major 
Pynchon himself thought he would be better off to remove 
to Boston, where he had some property left. But, strong in 
the sense of duty, which was a family trait, he wrote to Gov- 
ernor Leverett in language of 

manliness and fortitude: /t^L ^P / 

-I resolve to attend what ^-f/^^^^n^^ 

God calls me to do and to ^ ^^ 9 

stick to it as long as I can, ^ 

^ . 1 T 1 1 . AUTOGHAPII OK JoH.V PyNCHOX. 

and, though 1 have such great 

loss of the creature comforts, yet to do what I can in defending 

this place." Thus he furnished a good motto for all the sons and 



82 HISTORY OF SPRINGP^IELD 

daughters of Springfield in times of stress and difficulty: 
"STICK TO IT!" 

At last the dreadful winter passed into an early spring, 
so that the crops were got early into the ground. The hopes 
of the people began to revive. They had not much more to 
lose and if the war might only be successfully ended in the 
campaign of the advancing year, all might yet be well. But 
the Indians had been greatly encouraged by the successes 
of 1675, and their dreams of sweeping the white men out 
of New England seemed nearer to becoming true. They started 
early on the war path. 

On a day in March a small party of Longmeadow people, 
who, out of fear, had been deprived of all church services 
since the memorable fifth of October, were on their way to 
the meeting-house at the center. They were protected by a 
few mounted soldiers, men from the eastern part of the state, 
who had been garrisoned in Springfield since the disaster. 
The company had got as far as the brook at Pecowsic, just 
where it comes out from Forest Park, when they were set upon 
by Indians. John Keep of Longmeadow was killed, his wife 
captured and his children either killed or captured. The 
Indians escaped into the region of the park and made for the 
north. As soon as Major Pynchon was notified he set oft 
with others in pursuit, and overtaking the band, rescued a 
woman. It was learned from her that some, at least, of the 
attacking party were our own Agawams. 

Still bolder moves than this were made. Connecticut, 
after the Pequot war, seemed to be reasonably safe, but now 
an invasion into that colony was made; and Simsbury, only 
a few miles from Hartford, was attacked. Town after town 
in the eastern part of the colony was attacked or destroyed 
and the colonists were almost in despair. It seemed as if 



KING PHILIP'S WAR 



83 



savager}^ were indeed winning the day against civilization; 
as if a great continent were to have no better vise than as a 
hunting ground for wild Indians. 

But when it seemed darkest, it was really just before a 
decisive blow that shattered the Indians' hopes in a day. 
To show how this came about it is necessary to go back a 
little. Early in March the Indians, in one of their marauding 
expeditions down the valley, had captured a Springfield boy, 




Mrs. Rowlandson and John Gilbert at Turners Falls. 

John Gilbert by name, whose father had lived in Longmeadow, 
but was now dead. John, who perhaps had wandered too 
far east of the village in order to snare partridges or something 
of that sort, was taken as far north as the present town of 
Hinsdale in New Hampshire. Here he fell very sick and 
was finally cast out into the cold along with a little Indian 
child who had lost both its parents and was thrown out to 
die. They were found by Mrs. Rowlandson, the captive wife 
of a minister. With great difficulty she got the youth to a 



84 HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 

fire and he grew better. He watched his chance to escape 
and on his eighteenth birthday he succeeded. On reaching 
the settlements he was able to give very important informa- 
tion. It had not been known where the Indians of western 
Massachusetts were located, whether they had gone over into 
the Hudson valley or had remained nearer at hand. Could their 
rendezvous be discovered, and the whole body be surprised 
by a sudden onslaught their power for evil might be broken. 

When John Gilbert reached the settlements he made it 
clear just where the Indians could be found. It was at some 
falls on the Connecticut river, near the entrance of a river, 
now called Miller's river. It was a good place for fishing and 
here the Indians, by drying fish, were making themselves 
ready for the summer campaign. 

As soon as this information became known to Captain 
Turner, after whom the falls were eventually named, he 
decided to attack at once. He was now in command in the 
valley. Major Pynchon having been allowed to resign at his 
own request. Pynchon, though a wise counsellor in the war, 
did not consider himself especially fitted for active military 
operations. Although he did not go to Turners Falls, 
Springfield was well represented there by Captain Samuel 
Holyoke, the son of Mary Pynchon, a young man of brave 
and ardent temperament. He was second in command. The 
Indians were encamped directly on the bank of the river. 
With a sudden and terrible onslaught Captain Turner was 
among them without warning. Those who were not slain in 
their wigwams, plunged madly into the river and were carried 
down the falls to certain death. Such was the pitch of despera- 
tion to which the English had come in their fight against 
extinction by the savage that Captain Holyoke slew five old 
men, women and children with his own hand, as they were 



KING PHILIP'S WAR 85 

hiding under a bank. This is horrible to relate, like as it is 
to the stories of an older time ; but when the life of a people 
is at stake means are not nicely measured. At best, war 
is terrible. 

The noise of the attack had aroused another band of 
Indians who were not far off and they at once attacked the 
invaders. It w^as said that Philip was approaching with a 
thousand warriors. The victory of the English was now 
turned into a retreat, and, owing to certain circumstances, a 
retreat which it was very difficult successfully to manage. 
To make it worse, Captain Turner was shot and the command 
devolved on Holyoke. Already he had nearly lost his life 
with the vanguard. His horse had been shot under him. As 
several warriors rushed upon him he killed one and his men 
drove back the rest. It was, nevertheless, his self-possession 
and courage that saved the day, and he marched into Hadley 
the surviving victor of the famous "Falls Fight." 

But the strain of those hours was too much. He returned 
to Springfield and in a few short months died from the effects 
of the exertion, a sacrifice to the cause of civilization in the 
Connecticut valley, and, indeed, the whole state. It is, 
perhaps for him, more likely for his father, Elijah Hol- 
yoke, that the mountain is named which looks down on the 
scenes of his life and victory. 

The Falls Fight, notwithstanding the rout of the English 
at the end of it, was really a great disaster for the Indians. 
It broke up the fisheries, on which Philip depended for his 
supplies during the summer campaign. Many sachems, 
sagamores and braves were killed, and Philip, almost in despair, 
left the valley of the great river for his own country. As it 
turned out, the Falls Fight, in which John Gilbert and Captain 
Holyoke of Springfield had borne so important a part, was the 



86 HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 

last great event of the war, except the death of Philip himself. 
The Indian cause seemed all at once to collapse. Bereft of 
his family, his supporters killed in the Swamp Fight of the 
preceding winter and the Falls Fight of May 18th, Philip 
himself was at last corralled by Captain Church in a swamp. 
Swamps were a favorite place of refuge with Indians. As 
Philip was jumping from hummock to hummock in his flight, 
he was shot by an Indian, an ally of the English. Thus ended 
King Philip's war, so far as he was concerned, in August 1676. 
It was continued for a time by sachems on the Maine and 
New Hampshire coast, and then peace was arranged. 

Henceforth the Indians of New England were a doomed 
race; doomed to weakness, disease, intemperance and decay. 
It had been the glory of Massasoit to win by kindness the 
friendship and good will of a new continental power. It was 
the fate of his son to destroy that good will and make his 
people, as a race in New England, first, to be feared and then 
to be ignored and forgotten. Two centuries were to pass 
before savage warfare was to cease beyond the Hudson and 
on the slopes of the Rockies, and the last Indian warrior 
engaged in conflict with the American people, Geronimo, 
of the dreadful tribe of Apaches, h£is died the week that 
this work goes to press; but for New England its Indians 
were soon to be as if they had never been. 

"Alas for them! — their day is o'er. 
Their fires are out from hill and shore ; 
No more for them the wild deer bounds; 
The plough is on their hunting-grounds; 
The pale man's axe rings through their woods; 
The pale man's sail skims o'er their floods; 

Their pleasant springs are dry ; 
Their children, — ^look! by power oppressed. 
Beyond the mountains of the west 

Their children go — to die!" — Sprague. 



CHAPTER VI. 

SETTLEMENT OF CHICOPEE AND OTHER TOWNS. 
THE REVOLUTION. 




Chicopee Falls in 18:38. 



SPRINGFIELD had as yet but a very small population; 
all told there could not have been more than a few 
hundred people. But the Springfield of that time, the 
time of King Philip's war and for many years afterwards, 
occupies a large place on the map. The Indians having gone, 
there were none to dispute the English ownership, except the 
settlements made independent of Springfield and there were 
none of these in Massachusetts, except Westfield, nearer than 
Hadley and Northampton. Enfield and Sufiield had once been 
practically a part of Springfield but it was finally decided that 



88 HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 

they lay beyond the Massachusetts Hne. Although some went 
from Springfield to help settle Westfield, this town wanted 
Westfield to be independent. Some went over the river to 
establish their homes even before the war, like Lieutenant 
Cooper. 

Notwithstanding this scattering and the fact that the cen- 
tral village might be weakened by it, there was a friendly 
feeling all around and the dwellers on the west side are spoken 
of in old records as "our neighbors." Longmeadow was 
early granted a separate school and although there was a 
locality named Longmeadow Gate, it did not divide the in- 
habitants except in the matter of place. John Riley went as 
far away as the southern part of the present Holyoke and 
may be considered as the first settler of that city. Riley's 
brook perpetuates his name. In fact, when we consider the 
territory included and the settlers who branched out in one 
direction or another, for the sake of getting good, large farms 
all to themselves, yet were really inhabitants of Springfield 
and voted in its town meeting, we would find old Springfield 
to embrace the present towns or cities of Holyoke, West 
Springfield, Agawam, Chicopee, Ludlow, Wilbraham, Hamp- 
den, Longmeadow and East Longmeadow\ The early settle- 
ment of Longmeadow was of the great meadow itself, down 
by the river, Chicopee was settled largely by Chapins and 
there were so many boys in the Chapin families that the name 
is unusually common hereabouts. So for many years was 
the name of Bliss ; and no wonder, for Luke Bliss had sixteen 
children and Jedediah Bliss had as many and one over. For 
the sake of the good land and the river travel, the early settlers 
kept pretty near the water, but in 1721 Nathaniel Hitchcock 
decided to go to "the mountains," as they were called, and 
built for liimself and his wife a house within the present limits 



NEIGHBORING TOWNS 89 

of Wilbraham. Others soon followed him. These Manchonis 
mountains were the Indian hunting grounds. 

When the settlement of Wilbraham commenced there was 
one squaw remaining nearly half a century after her tribe had 
been gone. Her wigwam was on a little brook near the hill 
since called "W^ig\vam Hill." "Alone," says Stebbins in his 
history of Wilbraham, "the last of that mysterious race, 
who had chased the deer over these fields, trapped the beaver 
in these streams, speared the salmon in these rivers, enjoyed 
the freedom of these hills, kindled their evening fires by these 
springs, and, as they smoked their pipes, beheld the western 
sky lighting up, as the sun went down, as if with the smile of 
the Great Spirit and of the braves, who had fallen in battle, 
and buried their kindred under these trees, she lived solitar}^ 
the curiosity of the early settlers, harmless, quiet, meditative, 
seldom entering any dwelling and providing for her own 
wants. At last she disappeared; of the manner of her death, 
or of her burial place, no man knoweth. She passed away, 
as a shadow of the vanished race and joined the company of 
her fathers." In 1750 Captain Miller went out and settled 
Ludlow. It thus happened that there were, before the Revo- 
lution, dwellers within the limits of all the cities and towns 
which have been made out of the old Springfield. 

When different localities came to be settled or used it is 
interesting to see what old Indian names they kept and what 
new ones they got. Take, for example, the Mill river valley. 
The land where the lesser river joins the greater one was known 
to the Indians as Usquaiok, which was, perhaps, the name 
of the stream. Mill river meant more to the settlers than 
Usquaiok, yet, just across the Connecticut they kept for the 
stream and the town, the word Agawam, the fish curing place 
of the Indians, where there were salmon and shad in plenty. 



90 



HISTOin OF Sl'RINGFIELD 



Following up the Mill river valley, we pass the Water 
Shops, an odd name, indicating the use of water power. Fol- 
lowing the south branch we come to the neighborhood of 
Wachogue, formerly called Wachuet, an Indian word mean- 
ing "land near the hill." There were once "great Wachuet" 
and "little Wachuet," good meadow lands near hills on or 
near the Hampden road. Further on, along the stream, there 
was a good lot of land which measured about sixteen acres 




("hudi'ee from Spbingfield Street, 183S. 

in extent. This was allotted to early settlers and "The 
Sixteen Acres" grew into the name of a locality. Still further 
up was a tract called "World's End," because beyond this, 
for a time, nobody wanted to go. 

The dingles or old ravines which cut into the terraces of 
the thickly settled parts of the city all had their names. At 
the beginning of St. James avenue was, and is. Squaw tree 
dingle and, near the Chicopee line. Hogpen dingle. The 
dingle below the \\\\sson Hospital was wSkunk's Misery and the 



NEIGHBORING TOWNS 91 

one beginning at Avon Place was Thompson's dingle. To 
the south are Long dingle in Forest Park, and Entry dingle, 
which last is in Longmeadow. These localities are shown 
on the map in the first chapter. 

Suppose, now, we follow up the Chicopee river for a time, 
beginning at its mouth, at the place which the Indians called 
Chicopee. Passing Crowfoot brook, named for an early- 
settler on its banks, and through the center, we arrive at the 
ancient Schonunganuck, now Chicopee Falls. Not far beyond 
is Skipmaug or Skipmuck. Noticing the outlets, as we pass, 
of Skipmuck brook, Poor brook and Higher brook, and 
the curve at Bircham's Bend we come to Indian Orchard, 
a name of which the origin is lost; The original locality of 
that name was on the north side of the river within the 
present town of Ludlow. 

We will return by way of the old Bay road. Crossing 
Poor brook again and coming into State street, near Squaw 
tree dingle, and where "the log path,' ' now upper State street, 
formerly left the Bay road, and crossing the Connecticut, 
let us follow the course of the Agawam. We would pass through 
Ramapogue at the West Springfield common and, reaching 
the stream just beyond, pass under the high bluffs which were 
once the banks of the old lake. We cross the little "Silver 
stream" flowing out from the hill in Mittineague or iVIened- 
gonuck and, passing through the village and a mile or more 
beyond, we come to a great bend called "the neck." The 
Indians, however, called this place Ashconunsuck. Just 
above is Tatham or Tattum, the meaning of which nobody 
knows. Pursuing our way west we cross Block brook and, 
rounding the course of the stream where it runs between the 
ridges of trap, we arrive at the fertile interval known to the 
Indians, and still known, as Paucatuck. This hamlet is the 



92 HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 

last before we reach the Westfield line. Paucatuck brook 
rises some miles to the north, beyond Bear Hole. Thus we 
see how English and Indian words of description are mingled 
in our names of places. 

Although, as we have seen, the Indians, as tribes, were 
no longer left in this part of New England, yet they continued 
to wander back from time to time and were occasionally 
employed on the farms. The danger from Indians was not 
yet over, but it was now the red men of Canada who kept the 
settlements in alarm. They had never been heard of before 
in these parts, but about ten years after King Philip's war 
ended and for more than half a century afterwards there were 
at times wars between England and France, which affected us. 
The French had settled Canada and, allying themselves with 
the Indians there, they made invasions of New England, 
particularly down the valley of the Connecticut. Northfield, 
Deerfield and Brookfield were most exposed. Men were killed 
and women carried captive to Canada. 

In Major Pynchon's day he was the military governor of 
the whole valley, and once when Brookfield had been attacked, 
he sent a force in pursuit of the Indians who were making fast 
for Canada. Among the pursuers was the same Thomas 
Gilbert, who had once escaped from Indian captivity. The 
Indians were overtaken while at breakfast. Six of them were 
killed, and nine guns, twenty hatchets and about twenty 
horns of powder taken. It was just like John Pynchon, 
writing an account of the affair, to say, " 'Tis God, not our 
twenty men that hath done it." Although the French were, 
from time to time, raising such dark war clouds to the north, 
yet in 1718, there arrived in Springfield a Frenchman who 
followed the ways of peace. He was a peddler, Samuel Malle- 
field by name, and appeared riding an iron gray horse. He 



NEIGHBORING TOWNS 



93 



brought more goods than one horse would carry, so, doubtless, 
the goods came by water from Hartford. There is in existence 
a list of all his wares, from which it appears that he brought 
something for everybody, — handkerchiefs, penknives and ink 
horns for the men, silks, fans and laces for the women and 
jewsharps and httle books for the children. Among a multitude 
of other things were over 1 1 ,000 pins. All this we know because 
no sooner had the peddler arrived than he fell sick and died, 
and a complete inventory of his goods was made for the 
Probate Court. 

But the peddler, vSamuel Mallefield, especially interests 
us, not so much because he came on an iron gray horse and 
brought 1 1 ,000 pins, but because on his deathbed he directed 
that all his property, after paying his expenses, should make 
a fund for the relief of the poor. The town accepted the 
bequest and erected a stone of table form to the memory of 
the French peddler, which may be seen among the ancient 
stones on the Pine street side of the 
cemetery. Very many years were to 
pass before his example would be fol- 
lowed; but in 1863 James W. Hale, 
a benevolent grocer, left most of his 
fortune to supply the worthy poor 
with coal, fuel and flour, from what 
is now called "The Hale Fund." 
These two men were the forerunners 
of many kind people who have made 
gifts and bequests for the use of the 
city. 

We are now come to the great days of the Revolution. 
Its battles were waged far away from Springfield; but, besides 
sending her men to join the-<armies of freedom, she had little 




Jambs W. Hale. 



94 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



glimpses and side-lights of events as they passed and made 
history for the now United States. It was on a day in June 
of the year 1775 when one, standing on Main street, near the 
Court House, and looking up street, might have seen a cavalcade 
of horsemen approaching from the north. They had just 
crossed the river and had turned into the Main street from 




^bk^i 



■J'avfkn, Main and Ki-m Sikkki> 



the upper Ferry Lane, now Cypress street. They advance 
down the street and halt in front of tlie tavern at (the present) 
Court Square. The central figure is a tall and really fine- 
looking man of dignified yet pleasing countenance. It is the 
new General, George Washington, on his way to Cambridge 
to take command of the Continental army. With him is 
General Lee. "He was," says Irving, in his "Life of Wash- 



THE REVOLUTION 



95 




ington," "in the vigor of his days, forty-three years of age, 
stately in person, noble in demeanor, calm and dignified in 
his deportment. As he sat on his horse with manly grace, his 
military presence delighted every eye." After dinner at the 
tavern, the afternoon saw the party again on their way up 
State street and along the 
old Bay road. We may 
believe that General Wash- 
ington, who was an ob- 
servant traveler, drew rein 
for a moment at the Wait 
monument, then rather 
new, and read the inscrip- 
tion carved for the benefit 
of wayfarers. 

The battles of Lexing- 
ton and Bunker Hill had 
already been fought. The 
minute-men of Springfield 
were already stationed at 
the fortifications around 
Boston. Here is a letter, with misspelling corrected, which 
one of the young soldiers from Springfield wrote to his father. 
It was written about the day of Washington's arrival, written 
from the very town whence the settlers had started, as told 
in the second chapter, 

\ Roxbury, June 29, 1775 

Honored Father: 

After my regards to you I take this opportunity to let you 
know that I am well, as I hope these lines will find you and all my 
brothers and sisters. I have some news to write. In the first place 
there was a skirmish between Charlestown and Cambridge and the 




Wait Mcmmkni. 



96 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



King's troops drove our men out of our intrenchment because thev 
had no powder and they have intrenched on Bunker's Hill and our 
men have intrenched on Winter Hill where the regulars retreated 

to when the first battle 
was at Concord which was 
June 16. They fired the 
same day at Roxbury and 
threw bombs and car- 
casses in order to set the 
street on fire, but by the 
goodness of God they 
did not, for our men, as 
soon as they had set 
it afire, would go up and 
put it out and they fired 
no more until last Satur- 
day. Then they fired again and tried to set it on fire but they 
would go and put it out. One of our men took one of the car- 
casses and brought it up to the General before it went out. 
And they set two or three houses afire. But they were as fierce 
as a bloodhound to put them out. Then the Rhode Islanders 
went down on the Neck with two or three field pieces and 
fired at them and made their sentries run to the breast-work. 
And then they fired upon our sentries and killed two of 
them. We are building a fort in Roxbury and digging a 
trench across the Neck. No more at present, so I remain your 
obedient son, 

JuDUTHAN Sanderson. 




It is plain that this young fellow was heart and soul with 
the cause of the Revolution. So were the citizens of Spring- 
field generally, prominent among them being William Pyn- 
chon, grandson of the "worshipful Major." There were those, 
however, who stood by the King. "Adamses, where are you 



THE REVOLUTION 



97 



going?" said Colonel Worthington to the great patriots, 
Samuel and John Adams, when they appeared in this town 




Discussing the Uevolution. 



in 1776, on their way to the Continental Congress. "To 
Philadelphia, to declare these colonies free," was the quick 
response. "Look out for your heads," replied Worthington. 



98 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 




#», 



^ ^ 



The sound of battle was far away ; but occasional travelers 
and soldiers returning from Ticonderoga and other posts kept 
the people fully interested and informed. It was this remote- 
ness of Springfield from the seat of war that, with other 
reasons, induced General Washington to designate the town 
as the place for the government manufacture of arms. He 
chose the plateau on which the Armory is now located, on 

the western edge of what he 
calls in his diary, describing the 
country between the Hill and 
Indian Orchard, "an almost 
uninhabited pine plain much 
mixed with sand." The location 
chosen was then the town's 
training field, but it was readily 
yielded to the new enterprise. 

One of the great events in the 
early years of the Revolution, 
which is in a way connected with 
this and neighboring towns, 
was the surrender of the British 
General Burgoyne at Saratoga. 
Indeed, some of the soldiers of this vicinity were there and 
remembered the event as taking place on a clear and beautiful 
day in September. Standing in military array they saw the 
British general and six thousand of his troops pass by to the 
place where the latter laid down their arms. The soldiers of 
freedom were poor and wore no uniforms, but "they stood 
well arranged and with a military air." "The men," wrote 
the Hessian General Riedesel, then serving in the British 
army, "stood so still that we were filled with wonder. Not 
one of them made a single motion, as if he would speak with 




Costume of the Eighteenth Century. 



THE REVOLUTION 99 

his neighbor. Nay, more, the lads that stood there in rank 
and file, kind nature had formed so trim, so slender, so full of 
nerve that it was a pleasure to look at them and we were all 
surprised at the sight of such a handsome, well formed race. 
Not a man was to be found, who as we marched by, made 
even a sign of taunting, insulting, exultation, hatred or any 
other evil feeling. On the contrary they seemed as if they 
would do us an honor." 

General Riedesel commanded some German troops from 
Hesse-Cassel who had been hired by the king to serve in 
America. In fact the great mass of the English people had 
not much sympathy with George the Third in his attempt to 
crush the liberty of the colonies. They were not eager to join 
the army and go to America for this purpose, so that the king 
bargained with the Grand Duke of Hesse-Cassel for 22,000 
soldiers to fill up his army. It is not to be supposed that these 
mercenary troops had any heart in the war ; but there was no 
German freedom in those days and they were compelled to go. 
Once here, both the English and German soldiers realized that 
the cause of liberty was the same everywhere and that what 
the Americans were fighting for was just what they themselves 
needed in their own country. It is not surprising that many 
of them deserted and made their homes in the United States. 

In the army that surrendered at Saratoga was a large 
body of Hessians, with their general. All these were ordered 
sent as prisoners of war to Boston. As there would not be 
enough to feed them if all went by the same route, three de- 
tachments were formed and one of these was sent over the 
moimtains into and down the valley of the Westfield or 
Agawam river, by way of Springfield, It was at the close of 
a wet day in October when this large body of retired soldiers 
emerged from between the ridges of hills that divide Westfield 



100 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



from West Springfield, and encamped on the West Springfield 
common. More comfortable quarters, however, were found 
by many at the farmsteads. 

In a large farmhouse in Paucatuck lived a little boy, Seth 
by name, whose father had but recently, gun on shoulder, 
come back from the scene of the surrender. He was intensely 
interested in stories of Ticonderoga and the doings about there 




Revolutionary Officers in a Farmhouse at Paucatuck, West Springfield. 



and one can imagine his excitement when a party of fifteen 
or sixteen officers from the two armies arrived at his father's 
house with the purpose of spending the night. The 
officers made themselves comfortable in the house and hung 
their swords and trappings above the blazing hearth-fire to 
dry. To the end of his life the boy remembered the glistening 



THE REVOLUTION 101 

steel and brass of the swords and scabbards as they flashed 
in the firelight. As for the common soldiers they staid out 
in the sheds at the cost of a good pile of cider apples that were 
waiting for the press. In the morning camp was struck on 
the Common, the farmhouses emptied of their visitors and 
the whole host crossed the river to Springfield, whence they 
proceeded towards Brookfield. 

But not all went. An Englishman named Worthy thought 
that this part of the country was good enough for him and 
contrived to drop out, as did a German named Wagoner. 
Worthy used to say that when the British common soldiers 
got over here they found that the Americans had the right of 
the cause. One other deserter there was, a horse, too lame, 
perhaps, to go further. He, too, found friends in West Spring- 
field and to the end of his days went by the name of "Old 
Burgoyne." 





NOKTHEAST ClIKNEJ; nl C'l H K 1 S(,M \Ul-, 1 ^,^0. 



CHAPTER VII. 

SHAYS' REBELLION.— THE CONSTITUTION.— 1783-1789. 

SHAYS' Rebellion was one of the unfortunate incidents 
in the history of Massachusetts. It is interesting because 
it shows a people, almost a majority, in opposition to 
the regular action of a government which they had just set 
up; and it is important in a history of Springfield because 
it was here that some of the most stirring scenes occurred. 
Sometimes it has been called an insurrection, sometimes a 
rebellion. An insurrection is a rising to prevent the operation 
of the laws by force of arms. A rebellion is such an opposition 
widely extended. In this case the movement, by spreading 
through the state, passed from an insuiTection to a rebellion, 
although not a bloody one. It is included in the years 1783- 
1787. What was its cause? 

During the Revolution the colonies had been too poor to 
pay the soldiers properly, too poor indeed, properly to feed 
and uniform the men; men who had, perhaps, left wife and 
children at home to get a very poor living on the farm while 
the husband and father served the cause. Money often had 
to be borrowed for them to live on. But the soldiers were 
paid in paper money, good so long as it would pass for the 
value stamped on its face, but it would so pass only so long 
as it could be exchanged for that which had a value in itself, 
gold or silver. In the colonies there was not enough gold or 
silver to go around and be exchanged for all this paper money ; 
so it began to get worthless, and the more that it was printed 
and given out the more worthless it got. 



104 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



But the soldiers needed real money. When they got home 
to their farms they found, perhaps, that the oxen, which had 
not been needed for work during their absence, had been 
killed for beef. Now that the farmer himself was exchanging 
the gun for the plough, new oxen must be bought, or a new 
horse. Perhaps the farmer who had served in one or two 
campaigns was drafted for another and had to borrow money 
to pay for some one to go to the war in his place. The money 
was borrowed in coin and now the returning soldier found 
nothing in his hands with which to pay, except the now 

almost worthless paper. The former 
price of a yoke of oxen would scarce 
buy three mugs of cider ; and if a man 
had borrowed a hundred dollars, he 
must now get four thousand dollars in 
paper money to make it good. This 
farmer, pictured in an old broad side, 
"The Looking glass for 1787," has 
filled a bag with paper money and 
even then has scarcely enough to 
pay his taxes. 

When things came to this pass 
everybody was alarmed for the 
future. Business, of course, came 
very much to a standstill and it was hard to sell any- 
thing with which to pay anybody. People to whom 
debts were due began to collect them. If tlic debtor 
could not pay he was brought before the court and 
his farm or personal property was ordered to be sold 
to raise the money, and when nobody wanted to buy 
nothing would bring its real value. The debtor was ruined 
and under the old law of imprisonment for debt might have 




SHAYS' REBELIJON 105 

to go to jail. Thus it came to pass that a sense of distress, 
suffering and alarm overspread Massachusetts and involved 
a considerable portion of the population. The large portion 
of the people who were not so greatly troubled might have 
done more to make things better. They might have passed 
certain laws which would have tided over the difficulties for 
a time till the cause was removed; but they were not wise 
enough to do so. 

The result was that here and there people began to consult 
together to see what they could do. All the danger was 
coming through the courts by the ordering of the collection 
of debts, so the malcontents decided to prevent the sitting 
of the courts. This was, of course, a high-handed proceeding. 
The courts had been established by the people of Massachu- 
setts for the purpose of doing justice between man and man 
and they tried hard to do so. The judges were not responsible 
for the laws but it was their duty to enforce them. The 
people had made the laws and it is pretty hard to justify the 
resistance of a free people to laws of their own making, even 
though some may unjustly sujffer by it. In this case historians 
do not justify; they have done no more than to excuse on 
the ground of great provocation. 

Early in the history of the insurrection an important 
court was to be held in Springfield. The Court House stood 
on the east side of Main street, south of Sanford and, being 
just across the town brook, was reached by a small bridge. 
It was the sitting of the court here at this time that the insur- 
gents wished to prevent. Not wishing to proceed to bloodshed 
they left their guns of the Revolution at home and came 
armed with clubs. They gathered before the door of the 
Court House in so solid a mass that the judges as they arrived 
found their way obstructed. Before the judges walked the 



106 HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 

high sheriff, General Mattoon of Amherst. "Make way for 
the court," said the sheriff. Nobody moved. "Make way 
for the court, I say," he repeated; and struck David Smith, 
Jr., of West Springfield, a painful blow with the flat of his 
sword. It is said that one man was thrown into the brook. 
However that may be, the crowd then gave way and the court 
was duly held. 

There soon got to be a feeling among the towns, particularly 
towns in Hampshire, Berkshire and Worcester counties, that 
something was wrong that might be righted; so that from 
Springfield and elsewhere delegates were sent to a convention 
to talk about these matters and see what could be done. 
But nothing was effectively done and the opposition to the 
sitting of the courts kept growing. Sometimes it succeeded; 
but not so in Taunton, where Judge Cobb, a former general 
of the Revolution, was holding court. When the insurgents 
arrived, he urged them to yield to the laws, concluding with 
these words: "Sirs! I shall sit here as a judge or die here 
as a general." The mob dispersed. At last there appeared 
military leaders and the forms of military organization and 
there was no longer an insurrection but a rebellion. 

The rebellion took its name from one of these leaders, 
Daniel Shays of Pelham, a hill town not far from Ludlow. 
Shays had no great ability but he had served with credit as 
a captain in the Revolution, he was a good talker and, in 
concert with Luke Day of West Springfield, Eli Parsons of 
Berkshire and an ex-minister named Ely, was very successful 
in rallying the malcontents about him. Luke Day is reported 
to have said that liberty is liberty to do as you like and make 
everybody else do as you would have them. Perhaps, if he 
ever said it, he did not say it seriously; for true liberty is 
freedom subject to laws made for the good of all, as Day 



SHAYS' REBELLION 



107 



and every other soldier of the Revolution well knew. Day is 
thought to have been abler than Shays, but Shays was acknowl- 
edged as the leader and even in adjoining states where the 
same troubles prevailed "Hurrah for Shays!" became a 
popular cry. 

As between the cause of Shays and that of law the people 
of Springfield were 

divided. Springfield, -"1^^ 

because of the Court 
House and the Ar- 
mory, became at 
once a great center of 
interest, as to which 
side should prevail, 
so that September 





Defending the Court House in Shavs Ki:iiEi.i,i(iN. 

26, 1786 is memorable in our history. On that day the highest 
Court of the Commonwealth was to sit here, composed of the 
chief justice and three other judges and Shays meant to 
prevent it. His camp was near the comer of Main and Ferry 
streets. His men had no uniforms but could be told from the 
rest by a sprig of evergreen worn in the hat. The other side 
wore a piece of white paper in the same way. General Shep- 



108 HISTORY OF SPRINGP^IELD 

ard of Westfield, a brave and magnanimous officer, was in the 
town with a force ready to protect the court. 

Then there were seen three thousand armed men marching 
up and down Main street, ready to fight each other on sufficient 
provocation. Almost all of them were from outside towns; 
but among the citizens themselves, neighbor was set against 
neighbor and the next moment men might be firing from one 
house to the next. The excitement was great, women and 
children trembling with fear; and we are not told whether 
school kept or not. Men were continually coming in from 
other towns and joining one camp or the other. More than 
one company of the state militia which arrived to support 
General Shepard, carried away by the "hurrah boys" of the 
other side, deserted in a body to Captain Shays. 

But there were staunch men left to the government side. 
Dr. Chauncey Brewer, going one night to see a sick person 
had to pass through Shays' lines and was an-ested by the 
sentries on Main street and brought into camp. Captain 
Shays ordered him to take the white paper from his hat. 
"No, Sir," said the doctor, "I shall not do it! Just give me 
a place to sleep." Twice he was ordered to doff the badge 
and twice refused. At last he was allowed to go home with 
his badge on. When the judges arrived they got safely to 
the Court House but as the grand jury did not dare to come 
nothing could be done. So the Shays party, having really 
accompHshed its object, went home. 

By this time the governor was thoroughly aroused. More 
and more he saw steady government going to pieces before his 
eyes and felt that something must be done. Loyal troops 
must be got and the state had no money to pay for them. 
He had to borrow money of Boston citizens to raise an army. 
This he did and was able to place General Lincoln at the head 



SHAYS' REBELLION 109 

of 4,500 men. Of the troops raised here in the valley, General 
Shepard was in command. He at once proceeded to make 
himself strong at the Federal barracks, now called the Armory. 
None of the present buildings were there then ; but there was 
a building containing arms and in the woods a powder maga- 
zine, of which Magazine street is still a reminder. 

Captain Day was, meanwhile, drilling his men on West 
Springfield Common and making occasional raids. He cap- 
tured General Parks and Doctor Whitney in their sleighs 
and making a dash into Longmeadow, pulled one man out of 
bed and took him to West Springfield. Eli Parsons with his 
men of Berkshire was posted in Chicopee, so that, with Shays 
at Pelham, able quickly to descend upon the towns to the 
east, Springfield was in this way so surrounded that it was 
hoped to prevent General Shepard from being reinforced until 
Shays had captured the guns and ammunition at the arsenal, 
of which he was much in need. In fact. Day did capture, at 
Chicopee bridge, a supply of provisions sent to Shepard from 
Northampton, and Shepard began to be desperately afraid 
that he could not keep his force together until Lincoln's army 
should come up. 

By this time Lincoln's army was on the move to relieve 
Shepard and Shays saw that he must attack the arsenal at 
once or lose his cause. So he came off the heights of Pelham 
and appeared in Wilbraham with 1,100 men. The women 
and children of Wilbraham fled to Somers, but Shays kept 
on his way to Springfield. It was in the dead of winter and slow 
marching; so that Shepard was warned of their approach by 
a swift horseman from Wilbraham. He arranged his forces 
in two divisions; one on Main street, to keep Day from 
crossing over on the ice to join Shays and the rest he drew up 
before the arsenal and planted a howitzer in a good position 



110 HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 

with several cannon to the rear. Several times he sent his 
aids on horseback to meet Shays on the Sixteen Acres road 
and demand what he wanted. Shays' reply was that "he 
wanted barracks; barracks he would have and stores." He 
was told that he must purchase them dear if he had them. 

It was about four o'clock when Captain Shays with his 
more than a thousand men was seen moving down the present 
State street by Benton Park from off the Bay road. Reaching 
the vicinity of the present memorial boulder, they halted. 
General Shepard sent an aid to inform Shays that if he came 
nearer he would be fired upon, whereupon Shays started his 
men. Two shots were then fired by Shepard, not aimed directly 
at the rebels but only intended to frighten them. This having 
no effect, a howitzer full of grape shot was discharged into the 
center of their column. This caused a disturbance and the 
second or third shot put the whole army to rout. They turned 
and fled in confusion without firing a gun, leaving several 
of their comrades dead on the field. 

With such a ridiculous ending to the dreaded march of 
Shays, one cannot speak of the field of battle, and in all the 
rebellion there was nothing that came any nearer to a battle. 
Had Shays been more of a leader he would have done either 
less or much more. As it was, he proved very like that king 
of France, who, with 20,000 men marched up a hill and then 
marched down again. Henceforth there was no fear for the 
safety of the Armory until the days of the Civil war. 

If we may still use military language of such a fiasco, we 
would say that Shays, after the rout, fell back on Five Mile 
pond, where, making a stand, he next day joined Parsons in 
Chicopee with such of his men as had not deserted. General 
Lincoln meanwhile arrived on the scene, emerging from the 
Bay road and joining Shepard at the Armoiy. Being the 



SHAYS' REBELLION 



111 



superior officer, he was from this time in charge and proceeded 
at once to break up what was left of the rebeUion. A part of 
his force pursued Shays to Amherst whence he retreated to 
the fastnesses of Pelham where he, perhaps, thought that 
nothing but death and taxes could get him. He afterwards 
went for safety into the State of New York where he died in 
poverty. His life and exploits, real and imaginary, were made 
the subject of a ballad which became a popular song, even 
beyond the limits of Massachusetts. The entire ballad of 
nineteen verses may be found in the "Poets and Poetry of 
Springfield." The ancient music is here given. 




M)- name was Shays in for-mer days, In Pel-ham I did dwell, Sir, 



^i4r-dHid=:1=if 



4"^H-^ — ^—^ — ii~ 



:p=zp=zpzzp: 



:tu=t==t:=^ 



-• — m — •- 



t 



i 



#__^_ 



p=?=^=zE=t 



::1zz:::|==:j: 



1^ 



Hut now I'm forced lo leave thai jjlace, Re-cause I did re - bel. Sir. 



&SEFE33E:E 



:1: 



d^t^tr-. -r 



iPzzpzzp" 



cf=-y^t--ti: 



IB 



General Lincoln ordered another part of his force to cross 
the river to encounter Day, who was still posted on West 
Springfield common ; while the light horse meanwhile went up 
the river on the ice to cut off any union of Day with Shays, 
Day's men precipitately fled to some point beneath the 
terrace of the ancient river bank, perhaps not far from the site 
of the old white church where they made a stand and prepared 
themselves to receive an attack. Another flight and they 



112 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 




were on the heights where they were met by the Hght horse. 

Then began another rout. Some fled to Northampton and some 

fell out by the way. Among the latter was one Cooley who 

.^_^^^^ hid under a conven- 

js"'^*r'^m^s^. jgj^|. haystack and 

thereafter went by the 
fe name of ' ' the haystack 
Colonel." 

The backbone of 
the rebellion was now 
broken. General Lin- 
coln was kept busy 
for some months in the counties of Worcester, Berkshire 
and northern Hampshire in suppressing small outbreaks ; but, 
finally, a general pardon was granted to those engaged in 
the rebellion who would take the oath of allegiance, which 
they all did, and "lived happily forever after." 

Shays' Rebellion, though local, had results affecting the 
whole country. The news of it reached Washington, in the 
quiet of his Mount Vernon home, and he was greatly stirred. 
That such a glorious peace as ended the Revolution should 
be succeeded by such disorder he thought a disgrace. It was 
not a resistance to tyrants but free men resisting a govern- 
ment which they had themselves set up, — a government of 
law replaced by anarchy. He seemed to see the great work 
of his life undone. It was partly for this reason that be began 
to give the great influence of his character and wisdom to the 
creation of a strong central government which might help 
the states to maintain order. He again became the leader 
of the people, and, in part, out of such apparently unfruitful 
soil as Shays' Rebellion grew the final union of the states and 
the adoption of the Constitution. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

OLD TIMES AND NEW— THE CHANGE TO MODERN WAYS — 
THE FIRST STEAMBOAT.— THE ARMORY- 
DISTINGUISHED VISITORS — 

1789-1852. 




ELL me about old 
fashioned times," a 
small boy used to say 
to his mother, mean- 
ing the times when 
she was a girl. What 
really are the "old- 
fashioned times?" 
What is the old world 
and what the new? 
We use these words in different senses. We say that modem 
times began with the invention of printing and the discovery 
of America and, again, we say that ancient history is 
the history of the world before Christ, which we call B. C. 
But when we are thinking of old and new in Springfield 
we might properly say that the old fashioned times gave 
place to the new in the period between the birth of the 
nation by the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 and 
the incorporation of Springfield as a city in 1852. During 
this period the ways of life had greatly changed and 
causes began to be which later resulted in still further changes. 
In the earlier days, men and women, boys and girls, lived 
in a different way. Their work, their amusements, their 



114 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



studies, their mode of travelling and even of eating and 
drinking were different. The change in so simple a matter 
as getting a drink of water is typical of everything else. Once 
a well sweep (page 24) stood by every door, except where 
there was a convenient spring. "The old oaken bucket, the 
moss covered bucket" is no more; there is not now a well 
sweep within the limits of Springfield. One of the first ancient 
customs to pass away was that of slavery. From the days of 
John Stewart there had been slaves in Springfield, all, with 




Map op Hampden County. 



that exception, black. Finally, people all felt that slavery 
was neither profitable nor right, and although the slaves had 
always been kindly treated as members of the family, yet 
the custom vanished of itself without the passing of any law 
against it. 

In this period, by the separation of Chicopee, Springfield 
came into the geographical form in which she has since re- 
mained, except for a slight change in the south line, and was 
henceforth the largest in population of the towns in the 
valley. For a time tliis was not so. West Springfield, at one 



OLD TIMES AND NEW 



115 



time, grew so rapidly as to be ahead of the mother town, and 
in the Revolution was called on to furnish more soldiers than 
Springfield; but the census of 1810 showed Springfield the 
more populous. Springfield, too, became the shire town of a 
new county. In the old county of Hampshire, which ex- 
tended from Connecticut to New Hampshire and Vermont 
and was flanked east and west by Worcester and Berkshire, 
Northampton had been a county town. When the old county 
was divided, the middle section 
retained the old name, taken from 
one of the old counties of Eng- 
land. The northern section was 
named for Benjamin Franklin and 
the southern for John Hampden, 
a famous English patroit, who, 
believing that "Resistance to 
tyrants is obedience to God," went 
of his free will to jail rather than 
pay the unjust ship money tax 
imposed by King Charles. He 
received his death wound fight- 
ing for the cause of Jiberty on one 
of the battlefields of the English 
revolution. 

Returning now to the ancient 
ways of life, we remember, as 
said in the second chapter, that in the very earliest times 
the people lived in houses made of logs and thatched with 
straw or grass. For windows they often had only oiled paper 
instead of glass. But things had gradually improved ; so that 
many of the boys and girls whose fathers went as soldiers in 
the Revolution lived in much larger and more convenient 




John Hampden. 



116 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



houses. Nevertheless, the best of those houses were rather 
cold in winter. Neither furnaces nor stoves were known. 
The only fire was in the great kitchen fireplace, with some- 
times another fireplace in the parlor. The great fire, built 
from huge sticks, crackled and roared and looked very warm, 
as indeed it was, if one was near enough to it. It boiled the 
kettle, hanging on the crane, and baked the buckwheat cakes; 
but while it gave out heat it was sucking in a deal of cold 
from all parts of the house, so that one would be warm in 
front and cold on the back, unless he sat on a settle. A 
settle was a seat with a high back extending to the floor. 
Sometimes the chimney place was so large that the settle 
was inside and one could look up and see the stars. 

When bedtime came the great fire was useless. It con- 
sumed a vast quantity of wood, the preparation of which made 
the sound of "chop, chop, chop," a very familiar one at every 
house, and, as there would be no one to feed it during the 
night, it was carefully covered with ashes, in order to keep the 

coals alive until the next morning. 
vShould it go out in those days when 
matches were unknown, somebody 
would go to the neighbors for live 
coals. The bed rooms were, of course, 
pretty cold, but, thanks to the great 
feather beds, the sleepers got warni 
after awhile and were able to keep 
so, sometimes by the aid of close 
curtains, all around and above the bed. Just before getting 
in it, the bed would be heated by the warming pan, a 
brass pan containing live coals and moved about between 
the sheets. 




OLD TIMES AND NEW 



117 




In the meeting-house there were no fireplaces; but the 
women tried to keep warm by the aid of a Httle footstove, 
filled with hot coals. The children, too, were often very cold 
in school. In the school house at Tatham little Lydia 
would find the pie frozen in the dinner basket under her 
seat, but she lived through it all to a healthy old age. It is 
not so much what we endure as how well we learn to endure, 
that counts. 

People made 
their own but- 
ter and cheese 
and the boys 
milked cows and 
churned butter, 
while the girls 
early learned to 
spin ; for the 
cloth generally worn was made in the family and for 
this reason called "homespun." It took continual spin- 
ning to make the clothes for a large family. The flax for 
linen was raised on the farm, then dressed and carded; the 
wool, too, was raised at home. For the colors, if brown was 
wanted, the children had to gather butternut leaves for the 

dye. With all this, milking and 
churning, spinning and weaving, 
planting and hoeing, haying and husking, thresh- 
ing and gathering apples for cider, all going on 
in the family, there was not much time for 
young folks to go to school. 

One of the most useful farming tools was the 
flail. With it all the grain that made bread for the family 
was pounded out by hand on the bam floor. The thumping 



pooTsroxE ^M) Wakminc. Pan. 




118 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 




of the flail was as 
familiar as the 
chopping of the 
axe as it cut the 
cords of wood for 
winter use. An 
old-time farmer 
used to say that 
he could always 
tell whether the 
man doing the 
threshing was working by the day or the job. If the former. 

the flail seemed to say, "By — —the day, by- — -the 

day, by— — the day;" if by the job, the flail sang merrily, 
" By-the-job, by-the-job, by the job, job, job." Such is 
human nature that one is apt to accomplish more when he 
works for himself. When the right to do this is entirely cut 
off the result is slavery. 

Notice the farming operations, pictured on these two pages. 
Late in March or early in April comes maple sugar making 
and when the weather gets warm enough to put the sheep 
into the water, their wool is first washed and then sheared; 

during the slack 
time of summer, 
when planting 
and hoeing are 
over, rails can be 
split for mending 
the fences, and in 
the fall the boys 
can catch rabbits. 
All these were 




OLD TIMES AND NEW 



119 




familiar scenes 
hereabouts in 
olden times and 
are now in some 
parts of the 
country. One 
who wishes to 
recall in imagi- 
nation the way of 
jiving in the old 
days may visit the 
Day house in West Springfield and see the ancient relics. 

But about the beginning of the nineteenth century several 
events happened, which in the end changed all this and made 
Springfield, first, a large town, and then a city. The chief 
of these was the discovery of the useful power of steam; this 
meant steamboats and railroads. Others were the invention 
of the power loom and the spinning jenny, moved at first by 
water power; this meant the gathering of people into mills 
and the disappearance of cloth manufacture from the family. 
Modem machinery, in which Thomas Blanchard, of this town, 
won much fame as an inventor, began to take the place of 
human hands. The family life was all changed. There was 
less to be done 
and the bigger 
boys could go 
to school in 
summer, when 
before they 
could only be 
spared in the 
winter. With 




120 HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 

all these changes there was more demand for work and 
more people began to come from other countries. 

As population increased the wild animals gave way before 
it. The panther retired to forests more remote; the beaver 
left the streams and the deer went further north and were not 
seen after 1820. The last bear known at Bear Hole came 
out of that dark lair about 1790 when Seth Smith was hoeing 
com. Wild turkeys lingered but the last survivors were those 
on Mount Nonotuck about 1850. The beautiful salmon that 
once leaped and danced in the rapids of Schonunganunk 
entirely disappeared, soon to be followed by the sturgeon 
and the shad, 

A century and a half had passed after the settlement and 
as yet all the crossing of the river had been by canoes, skiffs 
and scow ferry boats, when one day the minister of the old 
church foretold a bridge in coming time. "Parson Howard 
talks like a fool," said Colonel Worthington. But Parson 
Howard was right and in 1809 the first bridge was completed. 
Not being strong enough it went down stream; but in 1816 
another was ready that was to outlast the century. Its great 
timbered arches were an object of admiration. When the 
large droves of cattle that once passed through the country 
were going over the bridge, running, pushing and throwing 
their horns about, it was up these arches that the foot traveler 
could run for safety. Both the bridges were built with money 
raised by a public lottery, for it was not until later that the 
evils resulting from getting money by chance were so clearly 
seen as to make games of chance to be forbidden by law. 

How Springfield looked from the river, below the town, 
in 1796, was described by President Dwight of Yale College, 
who was taking a horseback journey up the valley. "We 
took," says he, in his "Travels in New England and New 



OLD TIMES AND NEW 



121 



York," " a road along the bank of a river from Suffield through 
an almost absolute wilderness and crossed a ferry, one mile 
below Springfield. On the river we were presented with a very- 
romantic prospect. The river itself, for several miles, both 
above and below, one-fourth of a mile wide, was in full view. 
Agawam, a considerable tributary on the west, with a large 
and handsome interval on the tongue between the two streams. 




joined the Connecticut at a small distance above. The peak 
of Mount Tom rose nobly in the northwest, at a distance of 
twelve miles. A little eastward of the Connecticut the white 
spire of a Springfield church, embosomed in trees, animated 
the scene in a manner remarkably picturesque. On this side, 
immediately below the ferry, rose several rude hills, crossed 
by a sprightly mill stream. At their foot commenced an 
extensive intervale called Longmeadow; abo\-e which, in 



122 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



the midst of groves and orchards, ascended the spire of Long- 
meadow church. The evening was just so far advanced, as, 
without obscuring materially the distinctness of our view, 
to give an inimitable softening to the landscape. 

"We arrived at sundown. The town is built chiefly on 
a single street, lying parallel with the river nearly two miles. 




The Old Toi.i. BRiixiK. 

The houses are chiefly on the western side. On the eastern 
a brook runs almost the whole length; a fact which is, I 
believe, singular. From the street a marsh extends about 
forty or fifty rods to the brow of an elevated pine plain. 
The waters of this marsh are a collection of living springs, too 
cold and too active to admit of putrefaction on their surface; 
and for tliis reason, probably, the town is not unhealthy. 
Part of this marsh has been converted into meadow. When 



OLD TIMES AND NEW 12S 

the rest has undergone the same process, the beauty of the 
situation will be not a little improved. The houses of Spring- 
field are more uniformly well built than those of any other 
inland town in the state, except Worcester. An uncommon 
appearance of neatness prevails almost everv^vhere, refreshing 
the eye of a traveler." 

On a Monday, the 27th of November, 1824, a crowd of 
people was gathered at the foot of Elm street and at other 
places on the bank of the river. They were watching the com- 
ing of the first steamboat seen in Springfield. The Barnett 
must have been an object of great interest as she rounded the 
bend of the stream and steamed towards the town. On this 
occasion the following are supposed to have been the words of 

THE STURGEON TO THE STEAMBOAT. 




" Wliat fur ye're makiii' such a dashin' 

And through the water such a splashin'r 
I'll tell ye what it's no the fashion 

In these 'ere parts, 
To make such a confounded buzzin'; 
Take care or ye'll disturb our dozin'! 
What are ye? first or second cousin 
To the Sea Sarpent?" 

Thus did a local rhymer express himself in one of the news- 
papers. It was in this period that river steamboats were 
displacing stages, afterwards themselves to be displaced by 
railroads. The sturgeon, a fish about as big and long as 
a man's body, has not, it is believed, been seen in this part of 
the river for the past twenty-five years. 



124 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



A line of small steamboats was established between Spring- 
field and Hartford. On one of these Charles Dickens embarked 
when he came to this town in 1842. "It certainly was not 
called," he wrote, "a small steamboat without reason. I 
should think it must have been about half a pony power. 
Mr. Paap, the celebrated dwarf, might have lived and died 
happily in the cabin, which was fitted with common sash 

windows, like an ordinary dwel- 
ling house. These windows had 
bright red curtains too, hung on 
slack strings across the lower 
panes, so that it looked like the 
])arlor of a Lilliputian public house, 
which had got afloat in a flood 
or some other water accident, and 
was drifting nobody knew where. 
But even in this chamber there 
was a rocking chair. It would be 
impossible to get on anywhere, in 
America, without a rocking chair." 
It was just before this visit of 
the great novelist that the railroad 
had been built from Boston to 
Springfield. The people of the 
town had been eager to bring this 
to pass. They knew that great things would come of it and 
Justice Willard declared in a public meeting that one would be 
able to go from Springfield to Boston "between sun and sun." 
But when he added "and back again," there were those who 
thought it a wild prophecy. Pictures of the early engines and 
cars look queer to our eyes. The passengers had to endure some 
bumping over rough track but they welcomed something faster 




Connecticut River Steamboat 

IN A Flood. 
From "Marco Paul at the Spring- 
field Armory" 1853. 



OLD TIMES AND NEW 



125 




than the old yellow stages, with four horses and a bugle, that 
connected Springfield with Boston, Albany, Hartford and 
other towns. The chief engineer of the new railroad was 
Major Whistler, whose portrait hangs in the City Library. 
He brought his boy James with him when he came to reside 
here. James used to amuse his schoolmates with his clever 
drawings and afterwards went abroad, where he became one 
of the famous artists of the world. His paintings and etch- 
ings hang in the great galleries of Europe. 

When the rail- 
road was built 
from Springfield 
to Hartford it 
made necessary 
the removal of 
the ancient ceme - 
tery at the foot of Elm street. The training ground and the 
pound had long since gone and for the cemetery there was now 
provided a beautiful tract of hill and dell which, for a cemetery, 
is exceptionally near the heart of the city, yet so full of birds 
and squirrels, old oaks and tall pines, as to be interesting to a 
naturalist. To this place was removed the dust of Mary 
Pynchon, of her brother, the Major, of the brave Captain 
Holyoke and the good French peddler. The selection of this 
spot was made by William B. O. Peabody, clergyman, poet, 
naturalist and a man of pure and refined character, w^hose life, 
most of it spent here, was a blessing to the town. By reason 
of his knowledge of birds the celebrated Audubon once came 
here to visit him. Verses by him are given on page 39. 

Tw^o notable men visited Springfield at about the close of 
this period. One was Louis Kossuth, the Hungarian patriot, 
a champion of freedom, an exile from his countrv, and a 



126 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



master of thirteen languages. He made here an address in 

English. The other was Father Mathew, the great apostle 

of total abstinence, whose wonderful work in Ireland had filled 

the world with his fame and 
made the temperance reform 
respected and popular. By 
his own efforts for temperance 
he had remarkably reduced the 
amount of crime committed 
in his own country. Coming to 
Springfield in 1849 and stand- 
ing in the church of his own 
faith, then located on the cor- 
ner of Union and Willow 
streets, he administered the 
pledge to people of all faiths. 
Many societies that are 
today organized for total 

abstinence bear his honored name. 

The Armory has been a great help to the prosperity of 

Springfield. We 

have seen that 

Washington ap- 
proved of the 

location here. 

When president 

he passed through 

the town and his 

diary describes his 

careful in spec- mminii ^<-.ja*r*,^_..«_-«iir 

tion. Little haci 

as yet been done; but later such buildings were erected as 




Theobald Mathew. 




OLD TIMES AND NEW 



127 



allowed a large manufacture. As the words are used in the 
United States, an armory is a place for the manufacture of 
arms and an arsenal a place where they are stored. It was 

decided that the 




f^nii^or 



V^to ceiling, 

* * 5!-' L^n 15 fellow. 



heavy work of 
forging the bar- 
rels should be 
done at the Water- 
shops, where the 
trip hammer 
could be run by water power, 
and on the hill, "Armory Hill," 
should be done the lighter work 
of filing, milling and assembling. 
Walnut street was then run 
straight through the woods and 
over the plain to connect the two 
parts of the Armory, and on the 
hill there began to be, as it were, 
almost a village by itself, com- 
posed largely of armorers, with 
even lawyers' offices, and a bank. 
So distinct were these commun- 
ities that there was rivalry be- 
tween the boys of the "Hill" 
and the "Street," and snowball 
and other fights were common 
between "Hillers" and "Streeters." When a boy of either 
set passed the line of School and Spring streets he was sub- 
ject to attack by the boys of the other side. 

The Armory has long been noted for its excellent guns 
and the old "Springfield musket" did good service in the 



128 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



Civil war; but, good as it was, the present Springfield rifle 
shows what may be accomplished by continual improvement. 
The tower of the Arsenal is eighty-eight and one-half feet 
high and among those who have ascended it for the fine view 
of this valley was the poet Longfellow. In his day a floor 
was nearly filled with guns, stacked in frames. His attention 
was called by Mrs. Longfellow to the fact that these stacked 
arms resembled the pipes of an organ ; and to this circumstance 
is due one of the finest poems ever written in the cause of 
universal peace. The prophecy in the second stanza was fully 
realized a few vears later in the Civil war. 




OLD TIMES AND NEW 129 



THE ARSENAL AT SPRINGFIELD. 

This is the Arsenal. From floor to ceihng, 

Like a huge organ, rise the burnished arms; 
But from their silent pipes no anthem pealing 
Startles the villages with strange alarms. 

Ah! what a sound will rise, how wild and dreary, 
When the death-angel touches those swift keys! 

What loud lament and dismal Miserere 

Will mingle with their awful symphonies! 

I hear even now the infinite fierce chorus, 
The cries of agony, the endless groan. 

Which through the ages that have gone before us. 
In long reverberations reach our own. 

On helm and harness rings the Saxon hammer, 

Through Cimbric forest roars the Norseman's song, 

And loud, amid the universal clamor. 

O'er distant deserts sounds the Tartar gong. 

I hear the Florentine, who from his palace 

Wheels out his battle-bell with dreadful din, 

And Aztec priests upon their teocallis 

Beat the wild war-drums made of serpent's skin; 

The tumult of each sacked and burning village ; 

The shout that every prayer for mercy drowns; 
The soldiers' revels in the midst of pillage; 

The wail of famine in beleaguered towns; 



130 HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 

The bursting shell, the gateway wrenched asunder, 
The rattling musketry, the clashing blade; 

And ever and anon, in tones of thunder, 
The diapason of the cannonade. 



Is it, O man, with such discordant noises. 

With such accursed instruments as these, 

Thou drownest Nature's sweet and kindly voices, 
And jarrest the celestial harmonies? 

Were half the power, that fills the world with terror, 

W^ere half the wealth, bestowed on camps and courts. 

Given to redeem the human mind from error. 
There were no need of arsenals nor forts; 



The warrior's name would be a name abhorred! 

And every nation, that should lift again 
Its hand against a brother, on its forehead 

Would wear forevermore the curse of Cain! 



Down the dark future, through long generations. 

The echoing sounds grow fainter and then cease ; 

And like a bell, with solemn, sweet vibrations, 
I hear once more the voice of Christ say, 
"Peace!" 



Peace! and no longer from its brazen portals 

The blast of War's great organ shakes the skies! 

But beautiful as songs of the immortals 
The holy melodies of love arise. 

—Longfellow, 1807-1882 



JmMm^w^ 




Entrance to Springfield over the Old Toll Bridge. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE NEW CITY.— ANTI-SLAVERY.— THE CIVIL WAR. 

WE have now come to the year 1852. As the new world 
reckons youth and age, Springfield was no longer 
young. With age had come numbers ; the population 
had reached 12,000 and the town was already not only a 
mother of towns, but a grandmother. The size of the popula- 
tion made necessary a change in the method of government. 
For over two hundred years the voters had all met together 
for the town business, gathering first under some tree, then 
in some private house, next in the meeting-house and last in 
the town hall on State street. At first the settlement was 
called a plantation, for this is all it was, a tract of planted 
ground in a wilderness and surrounded by wild beasts and 
Indians. This word had long been replaced by the word 



132 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



"town," meaning a community whose affairs are governed by 
selectmen chosen by all the voters meeting together in one 
place. 

This plan now becoming impracticable because of the 
increasing number, the General Court of Massachusetts granted 
a charter or body of laws for the regulation of affairs by 
which the government was to be by a city council and mayor 
chosen by the voters meeting in wards, then first created. 
Upon the acceptance of this charter April 21, 1852, the old 
town became a young city, the first in western Massachusetts. 
From this time there has been no essential change in the 
territorial limits, but each census has shown continued growth 
of population. 

Every town which has been incorporated into a city has 
its corporate seal. A seal is an engraved stamp which, being 
impressed upon paper or wax, shows that what is written or 
printed on the paper is genuine and has such authority as the 
owner of the seal can give it. The effect of the seal on the 
paper is, of course, to make a raised impression, but some- 
times a likeness of the seal is printed from a plate like type. 
By such a printing a book or document is not really or legally 
sealed, but for many purposes this is sufficient. The real 
seal is in the custody of the city clerk. 

The seal of the city of Springfield, as adopted, was de- 
scriptive of what the town had been and 
then was. In the lower left-hand quarter 
is a view of the river with boats and with 
houses on the bank. In the right-hand 
quarter is the house built by John 
Pynchon, or "old fort." Above, nearly 
the whole field is occupied by a view of a 
railroad train passing out of the station, as the station was then, 




THE NEW CITY 133 

and crossing the river. In the upper part of the seal is the 
United States Arsenal. Thus here are represented commerce 
by rail and river, manufactures and history. There is not, as in 
the seals of Connecticut and Vermont, any suggestion of 
agriculture. This only shows how the old "plantation" 
was becoming lost in the modem city. 

When the charter was accepted the first thing to be done 
was to elect a mayor and the members of the city council. 
The latter was composed of a board of nine aldermen and a 
common council. There were two candidates for mayor and 
both eventually held the office; but for the first time Caleb 
Rice was chosen. He was then the high sheriff of the county 
and had removed to Springfield from West Springfield. He 
had a daughter Elizabeth, who, when she grew to womanhood, 
went to Italy for study and married a citizen of that country. 
She wrote verses and, under her married name of Bianciardi, 
published a book called "At Home in Italy." 

Soon after the incorporation of the city there was built a 
City Hall, a large and towered building, holding all the city 
offices and also having a big audience room for public meetings. 
There was a bell in the tower that took up the work of the 
church bell, in announcing to the people, in the ancient 
fashion, that the hour of nine o'clock at night had come. 
It was also the bell of the clock, striking the hotirs. The nine 
o'clock bell was at last discontinued and in later years re- 
placed by the so-called curfew or bell at half -past nine. F'or 
half a century the City Hall was a favorite for large political 
meetings, fairs and concerts, but in 1905 it was destroyed by 
fire and the great bell fell to the ground. 

An exhibition was being held in the large hall. xVt the 
noon hour this hall was nearly deserted. A kerosene lamp 
was burning and a monkey got loose. Whether the monkey 



134 



HIS! ORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



overturned the lamp and caused the fire is not certainly- 
known. The fire was the occasion of a fine example of devotion 
to duty by two assistants in the office of the city clerk. Their 
names were Edith M. Ware and Bertha B. Fuller. They had 
both been pupils in Springfield schools. For the protection 
of the priceless records of the city there was a great fire-proof 
vault. It was necessary to take out the records during the 
day for use, but at its close they were replaced in the vault. 







City Hall. 1854-1905. 



At the beginning of the fire the city clerk was absent. When 
the knowledge of the fire reached his ofBce it had made much 
headway and danger was near. The first impulse, of course, 
would be to flee, and, indeed, everyone was fleeing from the 
building ; but there were the heavy books of priceless records 
lying about. The two clerks gathered them all up, placed 
them all in the vault and then shut and locked the ponderous 
door. This took time and courage. Meanwhile the fire was 
upon them and they were but just able to escape; in fact, 



ANTI-SLAVERY 135 

Miss Fuller, arriving at the door of the building, was so over- 
come by the smoke that she had to be rescued by others. 

Thus the lesson of doing one's duty, having been early 
learned, received its magnificent illustration in the face of 
danger and death and becomes a part of the history of the city. 
We recall the motto of John Pynchon, when, self-interest 
tempting him to remove from Springfield and leave the to^vn 

to its fate, he wrote that he should q .a ^^ ^ 

While Springfield was yet a town, there began to be a great 
deal said about slavery, as it existed in the South, and its 
spread into the new states. Among the people of Springfield, 
some of them were deeply interested. Most of them believed 
that slavery was wrong and a curse to the country and some 
wanted to do what they could to help the slaves. The laws 
were against them and forbade aiding a runaway slave, but 
they believed there was, in this case, a higher law, above the 
laws of men. Accordingly they arranged with others of the 
same opinions, who lived in other states, to aid the slaves 
who tried to escape from their masters. 

When a slave, traveling through the woods by night and 
successful in eluding the bloodhounds on his track, at last 
got into a free state north of Maryland, he would go to the 
house of one of the friends of freedom of whom he had heard 
in some secret way. Here he would be kept through the day 
and at night he would start for the house of some other friend, 
further north. Thus he would keep on until he reached Canada, 
and, that being a British province, as soon as he touched her 
soil he became lawfully free. The line of escape from Mary- 
land to Canada, by reason of the secrecy and night traveling, 
was called "the underground railroad," and the houses of 
the friends of freedom made the different stations. 



136 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



^l\lb.^ 



The house of Doctor Osgood, minister of the old church, 
no longer the only church, was one of the stations. It was 
on Main street, just below Howard street. When the runaway 
arrived, before light in the morning, he was given a break- 
fast and put to bed in a little back 
room which the Doctor called "the 
prophet's chamber." At night he 
started again on his journey. In 
one of these years as many as fifty 
slaves were sheltered by the min- 
ister. It is evident that Doctor 
Osgood was a man of sympathy 
and kindness and had the courage 
to stand by what he believed. He 
was interesting in other ways, blunt 
and witty in his speech, as illus- 
trated in the stories still current 
about him. All his life in the minis- 
try was spent in Springfield and he died an aged and honored 
man. When he was visiting a school, as a member of the 
committee, the teacher wrote a figure " 9" on the blackboard, 
without closing the loop at the top. " What's that," said the 
doctor, "a hook?" This amused the scholars and probably 
made the teacher more careful about figures. 

Among the citizens of Springfield who took an active 
interest in anti-slavery, there is none more famous than John 
Brown, but he was not then famous; he was only known as 
a wool merchant with his warehouse near the railroad and 
his house at one time was on the north side of Franklin street, 
about one hundred feet from Main street and is yet standing. 
He was more concerned about slavery than wool. His soul 
was on fire with indignation, that man should hold property 




S\MUEL B. ()sGr><)l) 



ANTI-SLAVERY 



V3'i 



.A i)() //' 



in man. He prayed much about it; but what could he, a 
wool merchant, do except to help the slaves along on the under- 
ground railroad, as others 
did ? There was no sacri- 
fice that he would not 
make. His famil}- felt 
as strongly about slavery 
as he did and on one occa- 
sion father, mother and 
children agreed that some 
money which was needed 
for furnishing the parlor 
of the Franklin street 
house should be used for 
the runawav slaves. 




The Slave Motiikk. 



138 HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 

One evening there was an address by the eminent Charles 
Sumner, who, as senator from Massachusetts afterwards was 
almost killed on account of his speeches against slavery. 
After the address Sumner and Brown went into the back 
store of Rufus Elmer, a Main street shoe dealer and ardent 
abolitionist. They were talking of the slavery question, when 
Sumner said, "Mr. Brown, slavery is doomed; but not in 
3^our day or in mine." Brown, raising high his hand, brought 
it down w4th decision, saying devoutly, "I hope to God to 
die in the cause." 

Not long after he went to Kansas and engaged in the 
struggle to make the new state a free state. He and his family 
risked their lives there and one of his sons was killed. He 
became widely known as " Ossawatomie Brown." He then 
went to Virginia and attemped to set in execution his plan to 
free the slaves, bv arming them with pikes. It failed and he 
was hanged for treason against the commonwealth of A^ir- 
ginia. But the countrv was stirred and this event was one of 
those that brought on the Civil war. It was not long before 
the soldiers of the National army were going to battle 
with the song of 

"John Brown's body lies mouldering in the gra\-e 
But liis soul goes marching on." 

Its strains were wafted back to his old home in Springfield 
and the children in the public schools were singing it. Brown 
made a mistake as to how slavery could be ended, but his was 
a great heart true to God and his fellow men, and really helped 
in the overthrow of slavery in a way that he did not think. 

John Brown of Ossawatomie spake on his dying day: 
" I will not have to shrive my soul a priest in Slavery's pay. 
But let some poor slave-mother whom I have striven to free. 
With her children, from the gallows-stair put up a prayer for me! " 



ANTI-SLAVERY 139 

John Brown of Ossawatomie, they led him out to die; 

And lo! a poor slave-mother with her little child pressed nigh. 

Then the bold, blue eye grew tender, and the old harsh face grew 

mild, 
As he stooped between the jeering ranks and kissed the negro's 

child! 

The shadows of his stormy life that moment fell apart ; 
And they who blamed the bloody hand forgave the loving heart. 
That kiss from all its guilty means redeemed the good intent, 
And round the grizzly fighter's hair the martyr's aureole bent! " 

— Whit tier. 

On April 5, 1857, died Springfield's last survivor of the 
Revolution, familiarly known to the children as "Grandpa 
Edwards." He had long been a 
feature in the processions on the 
Fourth of July, riding in a carriage 
and returning the salutations of the 
bystanders. His funeral was the 
occasion of military display, with 
martial music. 

There used to be much gay color 
and decoration in the militia, all of which was laid aside for 
serious business when the Civil war came on in 1861 . The City 
Guards, who were out at Grandpa Edwards' funeral, wore blue 
frock coats, light trousers and looked very formidable in their 
towering bear skin hats. The Horse Guards used to wear red 
coats, white trousers and chapeaux, like those of the Knights 
Templar, carrying a black or white plume. They carried sabres 
and had pistol holders each side of the saddle. The Light 
Infantry, who had flourished before 1 844, wore red swallow-tailed 
coats, white trousers, and on their conical hats wore fountain 
plumes, that is, several plumes drooping. By their side they 
carried canteens. The parade ground was the plain around 




140 



HISTORY OF SPRINGITELI) 




The Spirit of Training Dav. 



the lately accepted Gerrish Park. Training Day was one of 
the great days of the year to old and young. 

As the last of the soldiers of the Revolution were dropping 

into their graves, 
events began to 
happen which in 
the end brought 
forth a mightier 
armv than was 
ever marshalled 
in this country be- 
fore or since. One of these, as we have seen, was John 
Brown's raid in Virginia, voicing the feelings, though not 
the policy, of a large part of the north ; but the culminat- 
ing one was the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. 
Brown ineffectually struck at slavery, but it was for the great 
president in the midst of a war that shook the very foundations 
of the nation, to strike slavery down and give freedom to 
millions of people. 

It was at Chicago, in 1860, that Lincoln was nominated, 
and the president of the convention was George Ashmun of 
this city, a distinguished and able man. He had been in 
Congress and was an intimate friend of the great Daniel 
Webster, whose famous speeches had already taught the 
people that the Union could not legally be broken by the 
secession of any one or more of the states. Webster used often 
to be in Springfield, visiting Ashmun, and together they fished 
in the brooks of Granby or limited woodcock within the 
present limits of f'orest Park. 

A memorial of Ashmun remains on the lawn, where was 
once his residence, at the comer of School and Mulberry 
streets. Standing there with his little daughter and looking 



THE CTVn. WAR 



141 



at a small sapling, he remarked, "As the twig is bent, the 
tree's inclined," and twisted the two stems of the sapling. 
The great elm still stands to teach its lesson that it is in child- 
hood and youth that character is formed. 

After the Chicago Convention 
had nominated Lincoln, Mr. Ash- 
mun, as chairman of the com- 
mittee, went to Mr. Lincoln's home 
to inform him of the fact. Some 
friends had sent in a hamper of 
wine that the committee and others 
might drink his health. But ]\Ir. 
Lincoln, having early in life seen 
the evil of intemperance, never 
touched strong drink or offered it in 
his home. On this occasion, also, 
he showed the courage of his opin- 
ions and cold water took the place 
of wine. 

The inauguration of Lincoln 
w^as quickly followed by the loss 
of Fort Sumter at the hands of the rising South. From 
Springfield, of course, went forth brave men who should fight 
the dreadful battles of a four-years' war, to save the Union. 
Where are now Wilbraham avenue and other streets east of 
it was a regimental camp, drilling and awaiting orders to move. 

The children had a share in the great events. The girls 
made "comfort bags" which held needles, thread and other 
little needful things for homeless soldiers who had no sisters 
to sew on buttons or mend a rent and the boys collected money 
to pay for those things. There were men needed in the Armon' 
as well as on the field and the works were run night and day. 







AsHMUN Memorial,. 



142 



HIvST(Jin OF SPJiLNGIlELl) 



For four years the war went on, with alternating successes 
and defeats for the north until at last the victories won by 
General Grant indicated that he would, in the end, bring all 
out right. Guiding all was the wise Lincoln, criticised, reviled, 




Making Comfort Bags. 



weighed down with responsibiHtv, but looking always to a 
Higher Power for help for himself and the nation. 

One day the bells of Sy)ringfi.el(l rang out with joy; the 
President had made a proclamation freeing the slaves. It was 
very different from the time when the bell of the old Methodist 
church on the corner of Union and Mulberry streets was 
tolled, the day when John Brown was hanged. Only a few 
years had passed and what, at first, seemed an idle dream of 



THE CIVIL WAR 143 

an enthusiast was now an accomplished fact. Thus "Man 
proposes and God disposes." With great wisdom Lincoln 
had chosen the day and made the proclamation in which may 
be read this sentence, " Upon this act, sincerely believed to be 
an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military 
necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankimd and 
the gracious favor of Almighty God." 

In the spring of 1865 came the close of the war, quickly 
followed by the martyrdom of the President and the linking 
of his name as saviour of the country with that of Washington, 
its father. The regiments from Springfield and vicinity were 
mustered out of service and, returning to the city, made 
their last march through Main street, their ranks thinned by 
death and themselves looking worn and tired. But they had 
done their share in proving the truth of Webster's words, 
"Liberty and Union, one and inseparable, now and forever." 
Upon the results of the Revolution and the Civil war the 
nation rests in security. 

It was not many weeks after the end of this war that 
General Grant made a brief visit to this city. He had fought 
many battles in which his soldiers were armed with the 
Springfield musket, and of course, he was interested in the 
place of its manufacture. He inspected the Armory on the Hill 
and also the Watershops. He was greeted by a great crowd 
of citizens near the railroad station and taken upon a high 
platform whence he was introduced by the mayor, but he 
made no speech. His deeds were mighty, but on public 
occasions his words were few. There seemed to be nothing 
military in his appearance, except a narrow cord of yellow 
braid around his hat and the single star on his shoulder. 

Among those who came to this city and spoke in the cause 
of freedom in the days of anti-slavery and the Civil war were 



144 IIISrOHY OF SPHINGFIKLD 

Carl vSchurz, the exiled German patriot, who, after becoming 
a citizen of the United States, becamie a general in the army 
in the Civil war and afterwards a famous statesman; and 
Frederick Douglass, once a slave and afterwards an eloquent 
orator, who held high positions in the gift of the nation. An 
interesting woman who resided here w^as Eliza Farrer, a writer 
for children. She had had many experiences in various parts 
of the world and wrote about them in a book, which she 
called "Recollections of Seventy Years." 

Two men who had a very wide reputation were the 
editors, Samuel Bowles and Josiah Gilbert Holland. 
Doctor Holland wrote many books, of which his " Letters 
to Young People" were practical and popular. He wrote 
"Bay Path," an historical novel about Mary Pynchon, and 
started the Century magazine. There is a line profile of his face 
on his monument in the old cemetery, made by St. Gaudens, 
the famous sculptor of the statue in honor of Deacon Chapin 
on Merrick Park. Samuel Bowles, the second in the line of 
four journalists of that name, was one of the founders of 
modern journalism. He was once unjustly imprisoned in 
another state for telling the truth about a man who did much 
evil; for he believed that his journal should be outspoken 
when the pubHc interests were at stake. 




CHAPTER X. 




A LOOK BACKWARDS— THE SPANISH WAR— THE 
TWENTIETH CENTURY. 

X THE year 1886, Springfield celebrated the two 

liundred and fiftieth anniversary of the settlement. 

A quarter of a millennium had gone by and people 

looked back and compared the then present with the 

past. There was an oration and a great procession, 

including an historical pageant in which many boys 

and girls took part. The times of William Pynchon 

were illustrated in costume by those in the procession. 

The chief marshal was William Pynchon, seventh 

in descent from the founder. 

It is when looking back from one of these 

1 I . . ^ . 

view pomts that we realize how great has been 

the progress of the city in this long period. In this last 
chapter it will be well to select two examples and see how 
the modern times differ from the old. One of these exam- 
ples shall be the means of putting out fires and the other 
the education of children. 

In early days houses were, some of them, shingled, but 
many thatched with straw. Of course great care had to be 
taken lest a spark should get into the straw, as it might do 
from a burning chimne\' or from some one carrying coals 
through the street. So the town voted that no one should 
carry uncovered fire along the street and that every man 
should sweep out his chimney every month in winter and 
every two months in summer. He was obliged also to keep 



146 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



a ladder of sixteen rungs for better getting at the roof. One 
man was fined for smoking on a haycock. In order that 
water might be always at hand the ditch or brook in front 
of the houses was to be kept well scoured and a good stream 
running. So when fire came and the roof caught some went 
up the ladder and others passed up water from the brook. 
Until after the Revolution this was the only way of putting 
out a fire. 

At last some of the citizens bought a little fire engine and 

gave it to the 
church for the use 
of the town. Of 
course there was 
no steam about 
it; the power of 
steam was not 
vet known. The 
engine was merely 
a pump on wheels. 
There was a small 
reservoir for water, called a tub, and the pump handles were 
long wooden rods at each side called brakes. In order to 
see it in action let us suppose that it is the year 1810, a year 
in which a fire occurred in a house on the corner of Dwight 
and State streets. Whoever has discovered the fire has shouted 
the alarm. Everybody who hears it shouts "Fire! Fire! 
Fire!" at the top of his voice. The cry is taken up until 
probably from Mill river to Round Hill people are shouting 
"fire!" The bell on the old cliurcli is ringing. Everyman is 
obliged to keep a fire bucket and some have bags in which to 
carry out articles to a place of safety. When a man leaves 
his house he catches up his bucket, or if he is not at home, 




^mvmifmimmif TiT 



THE OLD FIRE DEPARTMENT 



147 



his wife tosses it out to some one who is hurrying by and will 
give it to the owner when he meets him at the fire. 

Meanwhile the engine men have opened the door of the 
engine house, then standing at a place which is now in the 
roadway of State street, near Market. The machine is pulled 
out and run up the street to the burning building. Men are 



jfc- 



r yife*^ 



V/'*^''- 




l<r^(Vf kJS/^G 







1 llh lU KMN 



now running to the scene from all directions. No sooner are 
they arrived than they take their places in a double line 
which runs from the house to the town brook. Up one line 
the buckets full of water are passed only to go rapidly back 
again when they have been emptied into the tub. Everybody 
works lively and the tub is kept full. .\ man standing on the 
engine directs the stream upon the fire through a short hose. 



148 



HISTORY OF SPRlXCiFIELl) 



The hose is so short, only five feet in length, that the engine 
must be got very close to the building, and even then it is 
not very effective to reach the roof. The men at the brake are 
working with might and main, and between their efforts and 
those who have got upon the roof and poured on water, the 
fire is put out. Some of the boarding is burned but the huge 
beams are only charred, even yet to stand for three-quarters 
of a century before the old house was to give way to a modem 
building. 

It was some years after this that a longer hose came into 

use and also a 

X ~^^^^ ~". f^JJISi suction hose, so 
that the engine 
standing by the 
brook could suck 
up its own w^ater 
and the firemen 
could reach with the long hose the Main street houses. As build- 
ings on Main street increased in height this was very important. 
One night the Hampden house at the northeast corner of 
Court Square took fire. As the hose was being taken up the 
stairs the firemen met a colored songstress, who had given a 
concert that evening. She was known as "the Black Swan." 
Frantic with excitement, she exclaimed, "Save me, I'm the 
Black Swan." "Look out, then," said a fireman, "or you'll 
get your feathers scorched." Of course the town brook was 
of no use except in the old part of the town, so, as the city 
increased, large reservoirs kept full by rains were constructed 
under the streets. Several of these remain, as, for example, 
one on Union street near Mulberry. The old engine was in 
time replaced by another and then others were added, the 
"Lion," the "Tiger," the "Niagara" and the "Cataract;" 




THE OLD FIRE DEPARTMENT 149 

then the "Eagle" and the "Ocean;" and there was a hook 
and ladder company manned by Germans. 

It was in those days of several hand engines that " Fire- 
men's Muster" was a favorite holiday. The procession was 
gay with the red coats, shining black hats and blue trousers 
of the men as they pulled at the ropes attached to their 
engines and hose carts. After the procession the "Lions" 
and the "Tigers," the "Niagaras" and the "Cataracts," the 
" Eagles " and the "Oceans' ' would have a grand trial of strength 
to see whose engine was best and who could pump the hardest 
and reach the highest point on a tall flagstaff, or, it might be, 
the steeple of the First church. The best engine, if well manned, 
could wet the rooster. To the comb of the 
rooster the distance is 169 feet. The bird 
himself is five feet high. He came over 
from London about the year 1750 and 
has looked down on generations of firemen 
and upon soldiers going out to several wars. 
A likely tradition has it that an eagle 
once alighted upon him and was shot from 
below. In 1902 one of these birds was seen hovering over St. 
Michael's cathedral. 

They are almost all gone who tried to reach the rooster in 
friendly rivalry with the old hand engines, and in these days 
the firemen have so much serious business that there is not 
much opportunity for sport. The great steam fire engines, 
the chemical engines, the hose tower, the extension ladders, 
the electric alarm and other devices for coping with big fires, 
aided by a water service that makes tlie town brook and ram 
water cisterns seem ridiculous, form a marked contrast 
between old and new times. If a man's house burned down 
he lost all and his neighbors helped him to erect another. Now 




150 



HISTORY OF SrUlNGFlELl) 



he collects the insurance from some company that he has paid to 
guarantee him against loss. The fine building of the Springfield 
Fire and ]\Iarine Insurance Company probably had in itself a 
cost of construction equal to the value of all the buildings in the 
town when the Indians gave it to the torch. 

We have already seen how simple the schools were in olden 
times and what sort of things the boys and girls used to do when 
out of school. The schools did not change much until the nine- 




Ancient ScHOOi.Hoi'SE OF West Springfiei.i). 

teenth century. There were but few things taught and those 
not particularly well. Nevertheless hard work counted, as 
it always does when applied to something useful. .\s in the 
second chapter we made an imaginary visit to the meeting- 
house, so we will now look into one of the schools of a hundred 
years ago, say, the school on Armory Hill, or in the Water- 
shops district or at Putts Bridge or some other school 
of the outer districts. In the summer the school has been 
taught by a woman, but now the farm work is over and the 
big boys, no longer needed for work, are coming in for their 
winter schooling. 



OLD TIME SCHOOLS 



151 



A man is needed for the winter term and a strong one, 
for the big boys Hke to show their strength and will measure 
it with the teacher the very first day. Some years they suc- 
ceeded in putting a schoolmaster 
out of doors; they have even 
been known to rub him in the 
snow. If he could not handle 
them his usefulness was over. 
The teacher of this year was 
a good wrestler. He determined 
to meet the boys in a friendly 
spirit and challenged the strong- 
est for a wrestling match. He 
won and was henceforth tlie 
master, and thus he was always 
called ; a title that meant a 
good deal, when the spirit of 
insubordination was liable to 
break forth, as often it did, in 
.an old time school. This was 
not so strange, considering the 
fact that the teacher was supposed to rule with a rod. If 
it was not a rod, it might be a birch stick and many a boy 
has been sent out 
to cut one for his 
own back. This 
old master wished 
only to cause tem- 
porary pain in his 
punishments, so 
he generally used 
a strap, which 
only stung for a moment. The boys called it "the tug." 





152 



HISTORY OF SPRINGFIELD 



NEW ENGLAND PRlAfER. 



As we enter the schoolroom we see the master at a rude 

desk in a comer. He is engaged in mending pens. They are 

11 of goose quills and to be 
able to put a neat point on 
them is one of his valitable 
accomplishments. On the 
desk is a sand box. Blot- 
ting paper is unknown, and 
to dr}' the ink some black 
sand is poured upon it out 
of pin holes in the sand 
box. The older children 
who have need to write 
ha\'e long desks in front of 
them, while the younger 
are seated on benches with 
no backs. Perhaps the 
writing lesson comes first, 
in which case the master 
produces some slips of paper 
neatly written with such 
sentences as, "Command 

the mind and then the pen;" and these the scholars copy. 

These copies the teacher would take with liim if he went 

to another school. The reading lesson 

may be from the "English Reader," or 

from "Webster's Spelling Book," or, ])er- 

haps, from the "New England Primer," 

in which last the younger scholars learned 

to remember the alphabet by such verses 

and pictures as those on this page. iMotice that 1 and J were 

considered as equivalent in old printing. 



As runs the Glass, 
Man's life doth pass. 

My book and Heart 
Shall never part. 

Job feels the Rod, 
Yet blesses God. 

Proud Korah's troop 
Was swallow'd up. 

The Lion bold 
The lamb doth hold, 



TheMoon gives light 
In time of night. 




G H IJ K L M 




OLD TIME SCHOOLS 



i.y.i 



Peculiar punishments were more common in olden times 
than now. The dunce cap belongs to a forgotten past but the 
writer remembers a so-called dunce-block, — the end of a 
huge beam painted red, in one of the lower grades of the 
Springfield schools, u]^on which silly boys were made to sit. 

There are now 
scarcely any coun- 
try schools left in 
vSpringfield and the 
country work and 
s]wrts have largely 
passed away. Few 
boys know how to milk and no 
girl can spin. The husking bees 
that made good times in the 
great bams on Main street are 
no more. Thanks to pond and 




To The 
Centr.\l Street Coasters- 
Shout, boys and girls, 

The victory's won! 
The cranky folks 

Can't spoil your fun. 
Bring out your sleds 

An' let 'em speed; 
The aldermen 

Have all agreed 
To let you have 

The jolly treat 
Of coasting still 

On Central street. 
1887 



hill, skating and coasting are yet 
in vogue, although for the safety 
of all, including children, restric- 
tions have to be imposed upon 
coasting on the more traveled 
streets. Sometimes tlie young 
people have successfully opposed 
restrictions, as appears from some 
in the Homestead. A spirit of inde- 
pendence, if in obedience to the laws, is admiral^lc, as in 
the case of the Boston boys who remonstrated witli Cicncral 
Gage when the British soldiers spoiled their coasting. 

Notwithstanding the more meager results and rougher 
ways, yet, so far as we can judge from what old scliolars have 
left on record about it, the school life of other (hiys contributed 



the placing of the.se 
contemporarv verses 



154 



HIS'l'OIIV OK SPRINGFIELD 



to that hap})y joycmsness which belongs to childhood and 
youtli. Take, for example, from the High School Portfolio, 
published by the boys and girls in the fifties, these verses 
from wliicli the fun bubbles up above all the mishaps. 



WADING THROUGH THE SXOW 



When the winds are blowing 

Hard, with all their might, 
And the snowdrifts measure 

More than half your height, 
Friends and schoolmates, ha\'e you- 

Now I want to know — 
Ever had the pleasure 

Of wading through the snow? 




ThK \\i: AlllEllXANK OF 

THE Old Uk;ii School, 

COITKT SllUAKE, SHOW- 
ING Bi'LLET Holes. 
Heh;mt, Thuee Fket. 



Dozen books to carry. 

Dinner basket full. 
And a great umbrella. 

On our way to school. 
Sixty miles an hour 

Railroad cars do go; 
Mercy! don't we beat 'em 

Wading through the sno 



w .' 



Falling into snowdrifts. 

Dropping everv book, 
Losing all the cookies 

And the ])ie we took; 
Feet and fingers frozen, 

Patience nearly so; 
Ain't it awful funny 

Wading through the snow? 



Opposite the arsenal 

Half past eight we see ; 
Goodness! we must hurry, 

Else, tardy we shall be. 
So we set to running 

Fast as we can go. 
Take two steps and tumble 

Headlong in the snow. 

Finally we halted 

At the schoolhouse tloor. 
With our journey ended. 

And our danger o'er; 
So with joyful faces 

Up the stairs we go; 
Think again you'll catch us 

Wading through the snow? 



OLD TIME SCHOOLS 



155 



It was vears after that the same girl described her life 
in one of the grammar schools in some verses, from which the 
following are taken, called 

A TRIBUTE TO AX OLD TEACHER 

Our memory wakes, and we recall 
The little, dreary, sandy yard, 

The schoolroom with its dingy wall, 

The straight-backed benches, stiff and 
hard ; 

Tlic songs, long since, gone out of date, 
With which the schoolroom used to ring; 

And the old-fashioned book and slate. 
Yes, we remember everything. 




But over all has come a change ; 

This is an unfamiliar place ; 
The only thing that is not strange 

Is our beloved teacher's face. 

Oh, could we take our dusty books, 

And once more trudge away to 

school, 

And sit beneath those gracious looks 

That softened e'en the strictest 

rule, 




' This is an Unfamili.\u Place." 




And could we hear his words of praise. 
That were so precious to our ears. 

And feel the patience of his ways. 

That never failed through all those 
years, 

E- We should not tease and vex him now 
With whispering, carelessness and noise; 
Of course, we should have sport somehow, 
But we should be good girls and boys. 



156 



mS'l ORY OF SPRlNGFIEIvD 



Springfield schools rank high among those of the country : 
in what respects do they excel those of the olden time? In 
many ways. In the matter of buildings they are better housed 
and equipped. They excel in teaching children to put their 
thoughts into writing; in bringing them near to nature by the 
study of birds and flowers ; in giving them the usefulness and jov 
that come from knowledge of drawing and painting ; in connect- 
ing their studies 
with the many good 
books of a large city 
library and the col- 
lections in the Art 
Museum. The kin- 
dergarten and man- 
ual training work 
are new. In general, 
the methods of 
teaching have so im- 
proved that more 
can be done in the 
same time, and the 
principles laid down 
by the great philoso- 
pher, Francis Bacon , 

"Man Shall Not Live by Bread Alone." 'lUd bv modem 

educators have been most successfully applied. 

There was, in the schools of Springfield, a l)oy who, as he 
grew up, became a lover of good books, good pictures and 
good deeds. When he graduated from the high school his 
spoken essay, composed by himself, was on the subject, "The 
Measure of Life." It is remembered that in it he tried to make 
his schocjlmates feel the trutli of the saving " Mim sliall not 




OLD TIME SCHOOLS 157 

live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out 
of the mouth of God." Thus early did he conie to know that 
the best things were to be chosen. He passed through college 
with credit but not long after that his earthly life closed. 
Nevertheless through him several things were made possible 
for Springfield. His name was Eugene Aston. He had a 
refined taste in art and for him is named the "Aston Collection 
of Wood Engravings," in the City Library. 

The art of engraving on wood is an interesting one but 
now, unfortunately, becoming obsolete. It is one of the ob- 
jects of this history to show by its illustrations what work 
can be done by drawing or engraving with lines as compared 
with the work of photography. In the Aston Collection may 
l)e found some of the best examples of wood engraving 
that this country has produced. The effect is obtained with 
a sharj:) tool making lines on the surface of a block usually 
of the wood of the pear tree. As the block sometimes splits, 
the printing is generally done from an electrotype which 
ingeniously duplicates in the metal the raised and depressed 
surfaces of the block. 

Springfield has had good engravers on copper and steel, 
like Goldthwaite and Chubbuck, and on wood, like Cleaves 
and Howard. The cuts on pages 68 and 80, from a school 
l)Ook of early days are rude indeed, as compared with the 
highly finished work of Cleaves on page 121, or the piece of 
commercial work over-leaf. In this book photography has 
been used in reproducing engravings from old books, as on 
pages 26, 41, 45 ; but where the lines of the original are 
delicate, as on page 134, they cannot be equalled in the 
copy. The cuts on pages 3 1 and 54 are printed from elec- 
trotypes of blocks loaned by the publishers of Webster's dic- 
tionary, a book which has carried the name of Springfield 



1.58 



IIlSTOin OF SinUXCiFlKl.l) 



all over the world. Illustrations like those on pages 77 and 
115 are photographic reductions of pen drawings. The 
engravings on pages 118-119 are repro- 
ductions from Anderson, the pioneer wood 
engraver of America. 

This cut of a gun by Howard is electro- 
typed from wood. It would be well t(j 
take a magnifying glass and see by what 
delicate lines the engraver got the mottled 
effect of the French walnut knot of which 
the butt is made. Notice also how the 
surface of the iron parts is made to sug- 
gest the original. Results of a verv differ- 
ent kind and yet equallv artistic though 
often less difficult can be ])roduced by the 
use of a very few lines, as in the cut of a 
woman churning, on page 45. In both cases 
careful drawing is of the \'ery first impor- 
tance. Good coloring cannot make up for 
bad drawing. 

It was in the nineteenth century that 
people began to be especially interested in 
the earlv historv of the town, (icorgc Bliss. 
Oliver B. Morris, and his son, Henry Morris, 
gave much attention to this sul\iect and the 
latter was the first President of the Con- 
necticut Valley Historical vSociety. This 
society was organized in 1(S76. the Centen- 
nial year, when the peo])le of this country 
really began to look back on the nation's past. 
Its volumes of pul)lished ])roceedings contain 
interesting reading about old Springfield. 



THE STUDY OF LOCAL HlSTOin ir>!) 

The city is also known outside by the historical publica- 
tions of the house of Gurdon Bill, who was the donor of the 
Soldiers' i\Ionument on Court Square, and its successor, the 
C. A. Nichols Company. The publications of this house include 
Holland's "Life of Lincoln," Abbott's "History of the Civil 
War," "Our First Century," "History for Ready Reference," 
a book much used in school and college, and " Rise and Fall 
of Nations." Green's "History of Springfield," published at 
the time of the quarter millennial of the city, largely as a 
personal contribution of Air. Nichols to the occasion, is a 
monumental work reflecting credit on author and publisher. 
To it this book is indebted for fourteen plates, like those on 
pages 20, 33, 121. Other books dealing with local his- 
tory, to wliich the reader is referred for further study, are 
Morris' "Early History of Springfield," Holland's "History 
of Western Massachusetts," Copeland's "History of Hampden 
County," Everts' "History of the Connecticut Valley," 
Ellis and Morris' "History of King Philip's War," Burt's 
"First Century of the History of Springfield," King's "Hand- 
book of Springfield," Wright's "Indian Deeds of Hampden 
County," Ward's "Springfield in the Spanish-American 
War," Stebbins' " Wilbraham," Bagg's " West Springfield , " 
Chapin's "Inhabitants of Old Springfield" and " Old High 
School," Storrs' " Longmeadow, " Palmer's " Chicopee Street," 
and Barrows' "Poets and Poetry of Springfield." 

"I have but one lamp," said Patrick Henry, "by which 
my feet are guided and that is the lamp of experience." The 
experience of the past, embodied in history, as it becomes 
better known, helps us better to understand our own time 
and thus to make better the coming times. Interest in histor- 
ical study is sometimes promoted by the drama, as with 
Shakespeare's Henry VIII and Richard III. How this can be 



160 HISTORY OF SPIilN(iFIEIJ:) 

done locally was shown by the historical pageant presented 
by the Central High School in 1909, in which costume, music 
and action united in presenting to the imagination a striking 
picture of Colonial days. 

In 1892 occuiTed the four hundredth anniversary of the 
discovery of America by Columbus. In Springfield the event 
was celebrated by the Hebrews. Rejoicing in this free republic, 
they gathered for religious services; and also listened to an 
address by one of the sons of Springfield, descended from the 
two townsmen who met their death at the foot of Long Hill, 
as described in the fifth chapter. 

As may be inferred from designs of the citv seal, manu- 
factures and trade have long since replaced agriculture as 
the basis of Springfield's prosperity. William Pynchon himself 
was a trader, an honest and successful one, and there have 
been others like him in these respects, some bom here and 
others coming from elsewhere. Our mechanics and manu- 
facturers alone would make an interesting study. They are 
the direct representatives of William Pynchon, who dealt 
in native furs and foreign goods and made boards and shingles. 
If they know the history of the town they have before them 
his illustrious example of honorable dealing. 

It was just before the Civil war that Horace Smith and 
Daniel B. Wesson became partners in the manufacture of 
pistols. When the war came on there was great demand for 
pistols and these two men acquired fortunes, for they w^ere 
good mechanics and understood business. They trusted each 
other and others trusted them and wanted their good work. 
They did not kee]3 all their wealth to themselves and their 
families. One of Mr. Smith's ways of doing good was by 
helping young men and women to an education. He enjoyed 
this; and, dying without immediate heirs, gave most of his 



SOME FORMS OF PUBT.IC SERVICE 161 

property to charity. The Horace Smith J^^und perpetuates 
one of his own favorite ways of doing good. His Ufe may be 
taken as an illustrious example of Benevolence, a quality 
of character which is not denied to any, whether rich or poor. 

Daniel B. Wesson was also benevolent, for, although he left 
a numerous posterity, he devoted an important part of his 
estate to the building of two liospitals. For our purposes, 
however, we may take his life as illustrating another moral 
qualitv. Whatever he made or had made, he determined 
should be made the best it could be, whether it was a pistol 
or a great hospital or the fence about the hospital. On one 
occasion, reading that a pistol of his manufacture had fallen 
from a shelf and. being fired by the fall, killed a woman, he 
lay awake nearly all night studying a device for preventing 
such an accident in the future, and before morning broke he 
had the invention in his mind. He thought whatever was 
worth doing at all was worth doing well and his life may be 
taken as an illustrious example of Perfection of Workmanship, 
a quality of highest import and almost universal application, 
if only in something so humble as the putting a point on a 
jjencil or making a loaf of bread. 

A second man, Primus P. Mason, may be mentioned here, 
of the race of Peter Swink of the third chapter, who by industry 
and thrift acquired property and, dying without issue, exe- 
cuted a cherished plan by giving his estate to found a Home 
for Aged Men. 

In early times it was the men who did most of the things 
of which history has to tell; but in later times the women 
have taken a useful part in the public life of the city. Among 
them was Clara T. Leonard, who gave herself, heart and soul, 
to prison reform in the interest of women. Deeply interested 
in the welfare of the young, she founded the Hampden County 



162 



IITS'lOin' OF SPRINGFIEIJ) 



Children's Aid Society, whose work is still going on. A second 
organization working for the same purpose is the Society of 
St. Vincent de Paul, named for the famous French x^hilanthro- 
pist. Both exist for the care of homeless and suffering children. 
Another devoted woman was Adelaide A. Calkins, who, with 
Ellen B. Merriam, a graduate of the Springfield High School, 
was the first among the women of the city to fill one of its public 
offices by becoming a member of the school committee. She 
gave twelve years of fruitful service to the cause of education 
and other years as an official of the Commonwealth towards 
improving the almshouses of the State of Massachusetts. 
United in friendship, Mrs. Leonard and Mrs. Calkins spent 
manv vears in work for the common good. 




Adelaihe a. Cat, kins. 



Clara T. Leonard. 



In 1898 there was war between the L'nited States and 
Spain, growing out of inhumanities practiced by the vSpanish 
authorities on the Cubans. The seat of war was the island of 
Cuba. (Jnc morning in May the Springfield companies of 
the Second Regiment, composed almost entirely of young- 
men, some of them scarceh^ out of their boyhood, marched 
from the State Arsenal tli rough Main street to the railroad 
station. How much the composition of the citizens had 
changed since the early days when they were almost all of 



THE SPANISH WAR 



163 



English or Scotch stock is shown by the fact that among the 
Hst of officers and privates occur names that are Irish, Ger- 
man, Scandinavian, French, Itahan and Hebrew. 

The regiment camped in Framingham and soon was on its 
way to Florida, whence it was to embark. ]\Ierrily did the 
soldiers sing 

" Tramp, tramp, tramp the boys are marching; 
Cheer tip Cuba, we will come," 

but once on Cuban soil they 
were face to face with the 
horrors of war. Young 
Arthur Packard, who first 
enlisted at fifteen, was killed 
at the battle of El Caney. 
Thomas Boon, having been 
transferred to the signal 
corps, was sent up in a 
war balloon for observa- 
tions on the enemy at the 
siege of Santiago. The 
balloon, ha\-ing been struck at a great height by fragments 
of a shell, fell, and young Boon was caught in a tree and 
entangled with its anchor and was afterwards dropped in 
the water of a creek. He received severe injuries which 
proved fatal after his return to Springfield. 

There were others in these companies who met then- death 
on the battlefield or at the hand of exposure and disease, 
including Henry Macdonald, chief of the city's police. They 
died for the freedom of Cuba and their names arc on the monu- 
ment at the foot of Round Hill. There was an old saying of 




Akthlk H. Packari). 



164 HIS'JOR^ OF SPRINGFIELD 

the Romans, "Duke et deconmi est pro patria mort,'' — "It is 
sweet and fitting to die for one's country." These went at the 
call of their country to die for the people of another land and 
their names and deeds are cherished, together with the names 
and deeds of those who fell in the making and the saving of 
this nation. Equally honored, however, although not mourned, 
are those who returned to live honorable lives under the 
banner of peace. 

In the year 1800 the population of Springfield was 2250; 
in 1900 it was 62,059. A large part of the latter increase had, 
of course, been due to immigration from abroad. The large 
families of the older stock had become the exception and now 
came people from Sweden, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Greece, 
Armenia and China. There had been an increasing Irish and 
German element from earlier times. There were people of 
French descent from Canada but not in any number from 
France itself; nor from Spain, Portugal or Japan; but there 
were Hebrews from many countries. These all have come, 
giving up their old allegiance, to take the name American, 
to defend the Constitution and to love and honor the Stars 
and Stripes. Like the ancient settlers of Pynchon's day, they 
have had to give up many old ways and to learn what, for 
this country, are better ones. Like the earlier settlers it is 
for them gradually to lose sight of old customs, the old 
language and the old nationality in the fusion of peoples in the 
new land. "Americanism," as President Roosevelt has said, 
" is a question of principle, of purpose, of idealism, of character; 
and not a matter of birthplace, or creed, or line of descent." 

This chapter ends with the nineteenth century. The last 
century of the second millennium of the present era was about 
to begin, called the twentieth century. The people of Spring- 
field felt the importance of the event. As the hour drew on to 



THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 1G5 

midnight, some gathered in their places of worship, others 
were upon the streets or awaiting in their homes the next 
stroke of the clock. The bells of the city rang out all together, 
tolling in slow and measured strokes the death of the old 
century. When the public clocks began to strike the hour of 
twelve, the bells changed to joyful notes of greeting for the 
century just beginning, and the great guns on Armory Square 
began to thunder their salute. This was in the two hundred 
and sixty -fifth year of the history of Springfield and the one 
hundred and twenty-fifth year of the independence of the 
United States. 




166 HISTORY OF SPUINGFIEI.D 



ANNIVERSARY HYMN 

Sung May 25, 1886 
At the 250th Anniversary of the City of Springfield 

Tune: " Portuguese Hymn." 

O God of our fathers! Their Guide and their Shield, 
Who marked out Thy pathway through forest and field. 
We stand where they stood, and with anthems of praise 
Acknowledge Thy goodness, O x'Vncient of Days! 

Thou leddest Thy people of old like a flock; 
They trusted in Thee as their Sheltering Rock ; 
The centuries pass, — Thou art ever the same, 
And children of children still trust in Thy name. 

'Twas here in the wilderness, silent, untamed, 
The gospel of freedom and grace they proclaimed, — - 
The gospel of home, of the school, of the plow, — 
And this City of Homes is their monument now. 

O God of our fathers! By river and wood 
Where Pynchon and Holyoke and Chapin abode, 
Our heritage blossoms with glory and praise, 
To Thee, our Defender, O Ancient of Days! 

—J)yey, 18:19-1890 



APR 8 I9US) 



I 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



014 110 870 ^ 



1 



